
NHS prescribing costs fall
pharmafile | October 22, 2012 | News story | Sales and Marketing | NHS, VBP, prescribing
The Department of Health’s annual report and accounts for 2011-2012 highlights the increasing pressure on the pharma industry to deliver value for money.
The prescribing costs of Primary Care Trusts in 2011-12 fell 0.4% to 8.2 billion compared to 2010-11 – despite increasing by 3.9% the volume of drugs they prescribed.
The NHS has to make £20 billion of savings by 2015 and needs to squeeze costs wherever it can – yet prescribing is the only figure out of a dozen primary and secondary care costs to have fallen year on year, according to the report.
The Department says the fall is partly the result of the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme – set to be replaced in 2014 by a new Value-Based Pricing system – which controls the price of branded prescription medicines supplied to the NHS.
It is also down to the community pharmacy contractual framework, which uses the cost of a group of generics to adjust the reimbursement prices of around 500 drugs, it says.
But the cost of pharma services – which includes local pharma services pilots and the new pharmacy contract – to the NHS rose 6.3% to 2.1 billion.
Despite the cost pressure, much of what the government has sought to do in recent months has received pharma’s backing: in August, for example, it directed NHS prescribing leads to incorporate NICE guidance into their formularies.
The Innovation Health and Wealth report last year outlined the ‘NICE Compliance Regime for Technology Appraisals’, designed to support patient access to NICE-approved drugs by ensuring all medicines are available to patients 90 days after an appraisal.
However, only last week the ABPI slammed the findings of a report by the NHS’s Health and Social Care Information Centre suggesting that NICE-approved medicines are not being taken up by the NHS in half of all disease groups.
Adam Hill
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