Indicative Prescribing Budgets

HC Deb 24 July 1989 vol 157 cc539-40W

Mr. Anthony Coombs

To ask the Secretary of State for Health by what means general practitioners will monitor their indicative prescribing budgets; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Kenneth Clarke

The Government indicated in working paper 4 of the NHS review series ("Indicative Prescribing Budgets for General Medical Practitioners") that the ideal way of providing information at all levels to operate the indicative prescribing budget scheme was an enhancement of the existing prescribing analyses and cost system known as PACT.

Our feasibility studies have confirmed that PACT can be speeded up, and made more frequent and more comprehensive. I have therefore asked the Prescription Pricing Authority and my Department to develop PACT to provide all general practitioners with monthly budgetary statements from April 1991. These budgetary statements will normally be provided no more than four weeks after the month in which the relevant prescriptions were dispensed. Existing PACT reports will continue to be provided.

I will continue to hold discussions with interested parties before deciding upon the detailed content and format of these reports and other associated improvements to PACT. I shall also be making available PACT data aggregated at family practitioner committee level to all family practitioner committees and regional health authorities from 1 August 1989 to enable them to prepare for indicative prescribing budgets.

My decision will take away from general practitioners the burden of paperwork which might otherwise be associated with the introduction of indicative prescribing budgets. An enhanced PACT will also provide regional health authorities and family practitioner committees with information they need both to set and to monitor budgets.

Indicative prescribing budgets will take full account of the fact that some patients and groups of patients, for example elderly people, diabetics and patients on home dialysis, need a greater volume of drugs or more expensive drugs than others. The scheme will ensure that budgets fully reflect these costs. There will be no disincentive to practices to accept such patients or to begin to prescribe expensive medicines to existing patients, if there is a clinical need to do so.