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Perhaps our dispensing fee should be celebrated rather than moaned about? After
all, if you run your dispensary efficiently and manage your running costs well, 50% or
more of your fee income could be profit.
You still feel hard done by? Then do the sums.
Let’s look at a practice dispensing 8000 items, equally split over 4 GPs as a case
study.
Rx 8000 items/28 days @ 190.8p = £15,264 (x13)

Total fee income = £198,432
If you can achieve the 50% profit here that’s just short of £100K in the bag. Happy
days indeed.
2. Manufacturer Discount Schemes (MDS)
Discount schemes are your golden eggs, but only if you use them. But at least you
can use them if you want to make the effort. Not like that for a pharmacy; they are
stuck with dispensing what you prescribe on the FP10.
However, all the MDS are meaningless if you don’t prescribe the item in the first place.
You are in the very advantageous position of being able to change your prescribing
to suit the best offers from the manufacturers and in hand you are in control of
maximising on profitable opportunity. Pharmacists would love to be in that position,
but they are not. You are.

If you fail to understand and take advantage of the discounts that are available then
don’t cry about your losses, you have no excuse really, do you?

3. Clawback
I know you are thinking ‘How is she going to put a positive spin on clawback?’ and I
understand why that would be so but, I think things could be worse.
Most of you will be subjected to 11.18% clawback on your drug payments. In other
words, your reimbursement for the cost of medicines and appliances dispensed
are paid after 11.18% is deducted, as an assumed discount you have received. This
sounds bad and I suppose it is but if you stop for a moment and consider that your
average generic achieves a margin of around 40% and you can seek out all the
branded lines with discounts, it’s not as bad as you think.

30 PS Magazine | Is your glass half full or half empty? Buy direct online at PSUK.co.uk

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