Industry leaders have demanded improvements after a C+D investigation revealed the causes of the errors that have plagued prescription pricing over the past two years.

An internal NHS Prescription Services (NHS PS) analysis, uncovered as part of C+D's Fight for Fairness campaign, showed that more than 50 causes of pricing errors, with mistakes made by both the automated payment system and employees.

Numark's director of commercial operations Raj Nutan said if the system was as "flawed as it appears" then the IT programme needed rewriting to take this into account, "or there needs to be an accurate manual system in place to check".

The top causes of underpayment errors identified between March 2009 and March 2011 were cited as incorrect quantities (caused by both operators and the intelligent character recognition [ICR] system which forms part of the pricing process); incorrect pharmaceutical forms (caused by the ICR); alphanumeric and memory code errors (caused by operators); and omissions (caused by the ICR).

Mr Nutan asked: "How can an ICR system have omissions? Surely this is a basic requirement of the programme?"

Further details on the frequency of different error types were listed on a spreadsheet showing the results of analyses of pricing errors carried out by NHS PS every month (see below).

The findings are unlikely to surprise contractors, who have encountered a number of error types including switching of items from exempt to paid, items being missed off payments, and, for one contractor, a "major error" in which 500 items were incorrectly switched to another contractor's pile.

Marion Harvey of Keats Pharmacy in Hampstead, London, told C+D this week that on her most recent payment statement, certain expensive items, worth about £240, had not been paid for after being incorrectly classified as "disallowed" by the pricing authority.

"We can check the expensive items, but what on earth goes on with all the rest that we can't?" she asked.

The NHS PS error analyses were released to C+D following an investigation using the Freedom of Information Act

C+D needs your help in Fight for Fairness

C+D has published the full results of NHS Prescription Services (NHS PS) monthly error analyses and now needs your help.

To conduct the analyses, the pricing authority takes a "random sample of prescription items" and investigates all errors, whether they result in overpayments or underpayments to pharmacists. C+D needs your help in analysing the data.   The downloadable spreadsheet of results lists 53 error categories, giving the number of each type of error identified in the analyses carried out in each month between March 2009 and March 2011. C+D is awaiting clarification from NHS PS on the sample sizes used in the analyses but, in the meantime, help us analyse the data and post your findings, thoughts or questions for NHS PS as a comment on this article or email them to [email protected]

Download the spreadsheet here