Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

No. That is not to say that if vulnerable people suffer, I will not take notice. The pharmacists will receive between €3.25 and €18.40 per item they dispense. There might be three items on a prescription or only one. We want to achieve a better balance between the way they are paid on the GMS, for which they receive the professional fee, and the DPMS, for which they get a fee and a 50% mark-up. We want to re-balance that and separate the price of the commodity from the professional fee. Nobody would understand it if we paid doctors some kind of mark-up towards their salaries on the basis of what they prescribe. We want to pay the pharmacists a professional fee and separate that from the price of the commodity. There is no question of the pharmacists paying more for the drugs than they will receive, a suggestion I have read in the newspapers and have heard from people who have contacted me. There is no question of that happening. How could that be the case?

This is a challenging time for health reform and we must all play our part. This is a key area of the reform. We must also reform the way in which we remunerate general practitioners. We have almost concluded the consultants' contract. Now we must deal with dentists and so on. Every morning when I wake up I hear about the disaster in the health services and ask myself where is the €15 billion going. We must provide a more responsive way of remunerating pharmacists than that we have used until now. Everybody would agree that is preferable. It is unusual that a 17% mark-up for the wholesalers should be double the mark-up in other European countries. The reason for that is that half of it goes back to the pharmacists. We believe in paying them a professional fee so that they do not depend on the price of the commodity to earn their income or on the payback from the wholesale sector.