Thread: Prescription charge

I hope someone can advise me...

I had a hospital procedure on the 14th Apr and started to feel unwell last weekend, i visited the GP out of hours unit who prescribed 2 types of antibiotics. I went to the chemist Monday, paid for 2 items and was due to collect them a couple of hours later. In the meantime i collapsed and was rushed to A&E, i was admitted and treated for the infection and discharged with antibiotics. I have been in bed all week feeling v poorly and now back on my feet - ish was wondering if the chemist is obliged to refund my prescription charge as i never collected the meds??

Thanks
M
x

You can ask them, but I doubt that they would be obliged to refund.

This isn't actually a medical question. It is a simple contract to purchase goods, albeit with the need for a licence (the prescription) to authorise the purchase.

The complication is that you are only making a contribution to the cost and the NHS pays the balance - so I am sure that there are NHS regulations for pharmacists that cover this.

I'm a community pharmacist and have been in practice for six years, and I don't think I've had this issue come up yet! There's no hard and fast rules about this I'm afraid so it's very much at the discretion of the pharmacy in question.

It partly would depend on how the pharmacy does it's paperwork - at the end of each month, all NHS prescriptions are sent off to the Prescription Pricing Division to be priced and to calculate how much the pharmacy needs to be reimbursed (basically we get the cost price/list price of the drug, plus about 1%, plus dispensing fees at varying rates). Any prescription charges collected on "paid" scripts are deducted from the payment the pharmacy receives as it's money we've already had directly from the patient - and as fewer than 10% of prescriptions are paid for, the NHS always owe us more than we owe them in collected charges.

So why is this relevant? Well, because the NHS has been cutting our reimbursement prices steadily over the past few years with the promise of commissioning new services (which generally haven't materialised to the extent we were lead to believe) most pharmacies now have to manage their cashflow very carefully, and ensure that prescriptions are submitted for payment promptly. So they may have submitted your prescription at the end of the month you took it in, in which case they probably won't refund your charges as there's no way to get the script back and cancel it.

If they haven't submitted it, you might be able to get a refund - but if the drugs in question had to be specially ordered in and are unlikely to be reused, the pharmacy probably won't want to give you a refund as they will then have made a loss on the cost of the drugs. As the drugs haven't left the pharmacy they could be returned to stock and reissued; if they had left the pharmacy they cannot be reused and have to destroyed if returned so in this case there would almost certainly be no refund. However some pharmacies might decide to refund the prescription charges and take the loss as a goodwill gesture, particularly if you get a lot of prescriptions from them.

I know I've waffled on a lot but hope I might have helped!