Hospital to start charging for prescriptions

Hospital outpatients in need of certain prescriptions will have to pay the same fee for medicine as they would at a community pharmacy.

The Pharmacy Department at Guernsey's Princess Elizabeth Hospital (PEH) was to start charging for eligible prescriptions from 1 October to "ensure a fair and consistent approach across all dispensing settings", bosses said.

Charges would be £5.40 per item, in line with requirements of the Health Service Law and approval from the Committee for Health & Social Care, the States of Guernsey said.

Fees would only apply to patients who would normally be expected to pay for their prescriptions in the community and anyone already exempt would not be charged, it added.

The States said: "In recent years, the PEH Pharmacy has dispensed an increasing number of outpatient prescriptions that were previously supplied by community pharmacies.

"While this has delivered significant savings to the States of Guernsey through lower medicines procurement costs, it has also created an inconsistency whereby some patients receive medicines free of charge simply because they are dispensed by the hospital rather than a community pharmacy."

It stressed the charge was a contribution towards the cost of dispensing the prescription and not the cost of the medicine itself.

It added patients would be asked to pay by card at the time their prescription was dispensed.

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