Pharmacists are protesting at plans by the Department of Health to get them to check the validity of all medical-card prescriptions from April 1st. A delegation from the Irish Pharmaceutical Union (IPU)walked out of a meeting with the General Medical Services Payments Board this week when the matter was discussed.
The board refunds pharmacists for drugs issued on foot of medical-card prescriptions but says it will no longer do so if drugs are dispensed on the basis of invalid medical cards. The IPU's vice-president, Mr Karl Hilton, said he learned at the meeting that up to 60,000 prescriptions from family doctors every month would be rendered invalid under the new get-tough policy.
He said pharmacists traditionally honoured prescriptions handed in by people who they knew were eligible for medical cards, even if their cards had lapsed or renewal of them had been held up as a result of "health board bureaucracy".
Now, however, they were expected to spend up to 20 minutes explaining, for example, to elderly people, eligible for free drugs, why they had to pay for their medication.
Last December the Department announced a clampdown on invalid or ineligible claims, saying that a stricter approach would save €2 million.
A spokeswoman for the Department said the clampdown was on fraudulent claims only which cost the taxpayer substantially. In cases of genuine difficulty, where eligibility was not verifiable, chemists would still have discretion to give free drugs. "It's not our intention that there will be any hardship," she said.