ABPI launches legal challenge to prescribing controls

pharmafile | July 5, 2007 | News story | |  generics 

The UK pharmaceutical industry has announced plans to take legal action against the government over the way it controls how GPs prescribe.

UK industry body the ABPI says it has been granted a judicial review of how prescribing incentive schemes and other methods are used to cut the health service drugs bill.

Over the last 12-18 months, primary care trusts and strategic health authorities have increased dramatically their use of incentive payments to doctors to switch patients off branded medicines to cheaper generic alternatives.

The ABPI says it has two particular complaints. First, it is concerned that there is no central guidance to ensure that switches to generic medicines are not made without proper regard to the welfare of individual patients.

Secondly, it says additional payments to doctors to prescribe certain medicines in substitution for other named medicines are illegal under European law.

The Department of Health says it will "rigorously defend the challenge".

It argues that the NHS could potentially save £84m if patients with high cholesterol were switched onto generic versions of statins.

"These generic drugs are safe, of good quality, just as effective, and used to treat many millions of patients worldwide," the department said in a statement.

 

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