Prescribing Budgets

The practice is set an annual budget for our prescribing costs. This is the costs of drugs that we prescribe. This year the budget is £1,603,110 and Wakefield Primary Care Trust has several ways of trying to get the practice to keep to this budget.

The PCT has sent one of their pharmacy technicians to do various things with our prescribing. So far this year she has swapped patients from an expensive osteoporosis prevention drug to a more cost effective (i.e. cheaper on) and this week she rationalised seven patients Pregabalin treatment and made a potential saving of £5,400 per year. Pregabalin is a drug used in epilepsy and for neuropathic pain and all the drug doses amounts cost the same. A 50 mg capsule costs the same as 100mg and we had a few patients taking two 50 mg casules that she swapped to 100mg – easy if you know how!

There is an incentive scheme whereby if we can keep our prescribing cost growth down to below 6.9% then if the practice achieves some quality indicators we are able to spend some of these cost savings on practice improvement. The budget is set on practice numbers at the end of March 2008. The practice budget does not grow during the year to account for any increases in patient numbers. The number of patients we have has increased by 600 since March 2008 or nearly 6%.

New patients often register when they need some treatment. Always cost our prescribing budget more because they often register when they need repeat prescriptions and our predicted out-turn has increased to £1,834,874. So, despite Lyndsays hardwork her saving of £5,400 is just a drop in the ocean!

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