Pharmacists say Drug Service has not paid them for three months

The costs of prescription drugs from commercial pharmacies could go up or patients may be turned away from receiving state-subsidised drugs unless they can afford to buy them, the pharmacists’ association warned on Thursday.

President of the Barbados Pharmaceutical Society Marlon Ward-Rogers disclosed that the Barbados Drug Service has not paid the druggists for the last three months for medications they dispense under the National Drug Formulary, a list of drugs that are provided free or made more affordable to eligible patients.

Saying the pharmacists are caught in a financial bind, Ward-Rogers said they could pass on the full cost of the listed drugs to patients to recoup the loss of income for those drugs that are sold from the formulary.

“The first option,” he said, “is that the cost of medication may rise in the interim, and the cost will then be passed onto the patient.”.

At least one pharmacy owner told Barbados TODAY he would rather pull out of the deal with the Drug Service altogether than raise prices.

“I wouldn’t pass on the cost at this point,” said Brian John of Enterprise Pharmacy in Christ Church. “That wouldn’t be desirable. We don’t need to do that as far, as I am concerned, in my situation. The alternative will be to suspend participation in the Barbados Drug Service and the drug formulary, at least until the payment is rectified. That is what I would have to do, that is what all of us would have to do.”

But the head of the pharmacists association said the payment delay had led to a slump in revenue, hampering his members’ ability to buy the same formulary drugs for which patients only pay a fraction of the full cost.

“Without these payments, obviously you know pharmacies have overheads, staff to pay and stuff like that; they wouldn’t be able to turn around and pay the suppliers for the same type of medication that would need to be dispensed,” Ward-Rogers told Barbados TODAY.

“So, without that, most pharmacies are finding it hard to turn around and procure the correct medication and the correct amount of stock that would be needed to be dispensed. And if payments are not made, other things would have to come about. For example, you can’t dispense what you don’t have. Then patients may come and realise that certain things from the Drug Service they may not be able to purchase. However, the other items that may not be on the Drug Service they may still be able to get because those are not items that would be owed for us by the government.”

Nevertheless, Ward-Rogers vowed the druggists would still try to help patients as far as practicable in the circumstances.

“Pharmacists still try to play a critical role, and try to help manage the patients and these conditions,” he declared. “They really put the pharmacists in a bind because we don’t want to look bad like we don’t want to help to deliver the medication and give them what is needed so they can manage their different conditions. But this time, you can’t give them what they can’t pay for.

“Depending on how long this delay in payment continues, it may reach a point where we may have to turn back patients…and, as I said, the only thing that might be available would be the items that are not on [the] formulary which you will have to pay full price for due to the lack of funding that the pharmacies have to buy the same type medication that would normally be distributed through the Drug Service programme.”

Ward-Rogers said the pharmacies have exhausted much of the formulary stock for which they had already been reimbursed.

“They would only be left with stock which is not on the formulary,” he explained. “The longer this goes on, it is really out of our hands and it may increase the price of the prescription in treating the same conditions.”

“For example, we have a lot of NCDs, non-communicable diseases. Especially at a point in time such as this when we are trying to tackle non-communicable diseases, we need to be able to keep the cost of the actual medication down to be able to facilitate the efficient management of the same condition.”

He said the pharmaceutical society has already reached out to the Drug Service which in turn has reached out to the government, but to date, there has not been any conclusive date or time when something will be done.

Ward-Rogers warned that the longer the pay delay drags on, the more strain it will place on private pharmacies’ own healthcare efforts.

“Nowhere else in the world do private pharmacies act almost like a polyclinic,” he said. “We do what we can to help out as private pharmacies to the general public healthcare system. However, the bottom line is that rent, utilities and staff have to be paid, and the same stock that has to be given to the same patients as well. So, it puts the pharmacist who has the best interest of the patient at heart, in a bind, because at the end of the day, they still have to be financially viable to keep their doors open.”

When Barbados TODAY reached out to the Ministry of Health for comment, Acting Permanent Secretary Wayne Webster said he would look into the matter.

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb