Dispensing Pool Arrangements
Published: 07/09/23
A big part of each pharmacy’s workload is the dispensing of prescriptions for people on behalf of the NHS.
Whilst the reimbursement element of our financial package covers the cost of the medicines which are bought and used as part of patient care, there needs to be a way of paying (remunerating) the pharmacy for the time and effort which goes into physically making the prescriptions up and ensuring that the medicines prescribed are safe and effective (i.e. the staff, expertise, and resources costs).
To do this fairly, each pharmacy gets a proportion of a monthly “dispensing pool” of £12.243m based on the number of prescriptions and instalments they do. Instalment and “normal” dispensings along with care home dispensings are all given the same weighting (i.e. each counts as “1”) when adding up a pharmacy’s dispensing activity. Very simply, the principle is that if your pharmacy does 1% of the prescription work carried out across the whole network, you get 1% of the funding pot.
Before 1st October 2023, if a pharmacy had done a lot of dispensing to care homes (over 2.5% of their prescriptions), this would have attracted a different fee from a separate pot of money. These arrangements changed from 1 October 2023 to recognise the integration of the care home dispensing payment with the dispensing pool payment.
In August, eligible contractors will receive a one-off payment as a proportionate share of a £3.619m backdated payment pot to rebalance April, May and June 2023 dispensings in line with the year’s Dispensing Pool annualised budget. Subsequent quarters will be paid as a proportionate share of the £146.916m pot.
It would be extremely challenging to calculate what percentage of total dispensing a pharmacy has done in a given month during the payment process – it’s impossible to know how many prescriptions have been dispensed across the whole country until the very end of the process. To manage this, the average of the last three months’ activity is calculated for each pharmacy and used as a reference to set the Dispensing Pool payment for each quarter as follows:
| Average dispensing taken for months: | Sets Dispensing Pool payment for months: | Bank payment at month-end: |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 22 - Dec 22 | Apr 23 - June 23 | June 23- Aug 23 |
| Jan 23 - Mar 23 | July 23 - Sept 23 | Sept 23 - Nov 23 |
| Apr 23 - June 23 | Oct 23 - Dec 23 | Dec 23 - Feb 24 |
| July 23 - Sept 23 | Jan 24 - Mar 24 | Mar 24 – May 24 |
| Oct 23 - Dec 23 | Apr 24 - June 24 | June 24 - Aug 24 |
Advance payments are made to support contractor cashflow while actual payment for the prescriptions submitted is calculated.