DH moves to block anti-competitive pharmacy applications
Practice Department closes loophole in control-of-entry regulations that allowed applications designed to prevent rivals entering market
The Department of Health (DH) has tweaked its control-of-entry regulations in England to prevent rural contractors making "half-hearted" pharmacy applications just to keep competitors out, a legal expert has said.
The DH hoped the amendment, which comes into force on April 1, would prevent pharmacists and dispensing doctors from making "sneaky" applications that they knew would fail in order to prevent others from opening, said David Reissner, head of healthcare at law firm Charles Russell LLP.
Under the 2013 regulations, if a pharmacy application in a rural area is turned down, no one else can apply to open one for another five years. But this rule had been modified so pharmacy owners could no longer secure a "five-year freeze" in their area, Mr Reissner told C+D on Friday (March 7).
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The DH hoped the change to regulations would stop pharmacies from making "sneaky" applications to prevent others from opening, said David Reissner of law firm Charles Russell |
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"It's a practice that might be carried out by dispensing doctors who own a pharmacy [or] it might be an independent pharmacy trying to protect [its] rural business. The change has been brought in to try to stop that," Mr Reissner said. |
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Under the modified regulations, the five-year rule will no longer apply if NHS England believes the person making the refused application was "motivated by a desire for the application to be refused", the DH has said. The DH made changes to its regulations in response to criticism that they lacked clarity and were the result of "defective drafting", Mr Reissner said. Other changes had been made to encourage more pharmacists to apply to open a pharmacy by making the argument that the business would bring "unforeseen benefits" that were not covered in the area's pharmaceutical needs assessment (PNA). Unforeseen benefits could arise where there was a substantial population without a pharmacy, for example, or where patients had to travel a long distance from the GP surgery to collect their prescription, Mr Reissner said. These kinds of applications were becoming increasingly common, Mr Reissner told C+D, and the changes were meant to "reflect flexibility" in the market. The amendments also close two loopholes relating to whether a distance-selling pharmacy can be based on the site of a GP practice or if more than one contract can be held on the same site, Mr Reissner added. |
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