The Department of Health is willing to negotiate its controversial dispensing fee regulations but will only do so if pharmacists withdraw their court action, the department’s Humphrey Zokufa said on Thursday.
”Yes, we will negotiate, but only if they withdraw their court action,” said Zokufa, of the department’s pharmaceutical planning and policy division.
Zokufa’s comments came as the Pharmaceutical Society of South Africa, Netcare, New Clicks and several other organisations met at the Cape High Court to set a date for their application for leave to appeal last week’s dismissal of their bid to have the new regulations overturned.
If the application for leave to appeal is successful, they will also apply to have the regulations suspended again, pending the outcome of the next court case.
This will allow pharmacists to charge their own dispensing fee until the outcome of an appeal.
”We were shocked when the court papers [from the first application] were delivered,” said Zokufa. ”They got uncomfortable with us drilling deep, so then they served us with court papers.”
At the briefing, the media were told that in spite of repeated attempts to get all the data from the pharmacists on which to base a dispensing fee, it never arrived.
”We were invited to their offices to view the data, but we wanted to take it away and interrogate it,” said Anban Pillay, director of pharmaceuticals pricing.
He said the only raw data they had was the unaudited financial statements of 176 pharmacies. These related to the entire pharmacies, not just the dispensaries.
They were then forced to base the current 26% or R26 cap on gross profit figures supplied by the pharmacists. They settled on 24%, then added 2% for the cost of keeping the drugs on the shelf.
They were aware that gross profits do not take into account overhead costs such as salaries, but could not move without the data they needed.
”In God we trust, for everything else we require data,” he said.
Zokufa repeated a call on Wednesday for customers to report pharmacists who do not comply with the regulations.
He said it will be unethical and against the requirements of a pharmaceutical licence if medicine is withheld because a customer challenged a price ”illegally calculated”.
He said that pharmacists are, however, allowed to charge extra for services such as deliveries, telephone calls to doctors to confirm details on prescriptions, faxing prescriptions and credit-card charges.
Courier pharmacists, who have been concerned over how they will cover their costs, are also entitled to charge delivery fees.
”That is between the courier company and the customer,” said Zokufa.
However, between the manufacturer and the pharmacist the price has to stay the same and any wholesale or distribution fees are included in the single exit price — the price at which medicine leaves the factory gate.
The percentage this forms of the overall cost of a drug is yet to be determined by the minister of health. — Sapa
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