Page 22 - P4403.59-V46_Numark Magazine December 23 PRINT FINAL

Understanding

the Drug Tariff

Our role as your membership organisation is to provide you with everything
you need to ensure that you stay profitable, well-informed and ahead of
the game in this constantly evolving industry.

One area in which can be really beneficial in understanding and using to
your advantage, is the Drug Tariff.

The Drug Tariff (DT) is the definitive guide to how a pharmacy will be
reimbursed for supplying products to patients; it is an essential document
but one that strikes fear into pharmacists and technicians alike. Questions
on ‘whether a product is allowed on prescription’ rank in the top three of all
queries received by Numark’s Information Services team, making up 15-
20% of their workload.

While a magazine article such as this cannot hope to cover all the
intricacies of supply and reimbursement, we can give you hints and tips on
how to interpret the information in the Drug Tariff, helping you to decide if
a product can be dispensed or not.
This article will describe the Drug Tariff as used in England and Wales. The
Drug Tariffs used in Scotland and Northern Ireland are laid out slightly
differently, for example with different names for the various sections and
some differences in reimbursement rules over. However, the concepts
described here, namely deciding whether a product is allowed on the NHS,
are the same for all UK countries.
The DT contains two main categories of product; medicinal products and
medical devices. In simple terms the pharmacy will be paid for supplying
any medicinal product as long as it is not in part XVIII the 'blacklist' and will
be paid for supplying a medical device as long as it is named in part IX A,
B, C or R (Parts 2-6 & 9 in Scotland). Difficulties arise when deciding if an
item is a medicine or a device.

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