Medicines Care and Review Service (MCR)

Published: 01/09/23

The payments for MCR are made using one of the more complex models in our financial package and is based on the number of people registered for the service (capitation model) at the end of a given month.

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MCR pool contribution amounts are used in calculating MCR payments. In order to get their full contribution from the £3.004m MCR funding pool each month, each pharmacy must have a certain number of patients registered for the service and have completed a Stage 1 assessment for each. This number is calculated at the end of each month by counting the number of valid registrations across the whole country and for each individual contractor, pharmacies cannot know exactly how many registrations to aim for, but our ready reckoner tool gives as accurate an estimation as is possible. When pharmacies do not manage to register enough people, their monthly funding can be reduced by up to 10%. On the other hand, these underpayments allow other pharmacies the opportunity to earn up to 10% more than their allocated funding if they register more people than expected.

MCR pool contribution (From June 2022)

The current annual contribution amount per contract is based on 12 months of part7 non-zero discount gross ingredient cost (P7 non-zd GIC) between November 2020 and October 2021 as a proportion of the total national P7 non-zd GIC. This is in line with the original method of calculation. Adjustments have been made to remove significant levels of care home GIC (>2.5% of dispensing within a month). The annual contribution amount is then divided by 12 for the monthly pool contribution figure.

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Calculation of annual contribution amount

£36.049m x (contractor part 7 non ZD GIC – care home dispensing >2.5%)
National part 7 non ZD GIC

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The overall total P7 non-zd GIC between the original calculations in 2011/12 and 2020/21 has increased by over 50% from £197m to £297m, so the distribution of increases and decreases in pool contribution payment vary across the network.

It is our belief and intention that rebasing should be completed more regulary going forward. This should result in less significant change than has been seen in this current rebasing in June 2022 (having not been done in over 10 years).

Any pharmacies which opened after the rebasing will receive a £600 minimum payment to begin with, but have no maximum payment set - so if they do build their business and deliver pharmaceutical care for people with long term conditions to a similar level as their more established counterparts, they are remunerated appropriately.

We are working on a revised remuneration model.

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