Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
Link to this: Individually | In context

Under the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest (FEMPI) legislation, payments to pharmacy contractors were restructured in 2009, 2011 and 2013, under:

• S.I. No. 246/2009 - Health Professionals (Reduction of Payments to Community Pharmacy Contractors) Regulations 2009.
• S.I. No. 300/2011 - Health Professionals (Reduction of Payments to Community Pharmacy Contractors) Regulations 2011.
• S.I. No. 279/2013 - Health Professionals (Reduction of Payments to Community Pharmacy Contractors) Regulations 2013.

Among other things, dispensing fees moved from a mixture of professional fees and retail mark-ups to an increased standard fee on a sliding scale for the number of items dispensed in a month, as follows:

• €5.00 for the first 1,667 items each month,
• €4.50 for the next 833 items, and,
• €3.50 for any remaining items.

The regulations governing the pharmacy fee structure that were made under section 9 of the FEMPI Act 2009 expired at the end of 2019. Under the Public Service Pay and Pensions Act 2017, these regulations had to be replaced by 1 January 2020 in order to maintain a statutory basis for contractor payments and to prescribe the fees payable from that date.

The current pharmacy fee structure was put in place by the Public Service Pay and Pensions Act 2017 (Payments to Community Pharmacy Contractors) Regulations 2019 – S.I. 639 of 2019 – which came into effect from 1 January 2020.

Since then, the overall spend on fees paid to community pharmacists under the community drug schemes has continued to rise year-on-year.

The Primary Care Reimbursement Service (PCRS) online system shows fees paid to pharmacies under the community drug schemes in 2019 were €420.9 million. These fees rose to €521.6 million in 2024 (see www.sspcrs.ie/portal/annual-reporting/report/pharmacy).

Therefore, a 10% increase on the pharmacy fees paid in 2024 would cost an additional €52 million at minimum.

There continues to be substantial investment by the State to keep pace with the increased activity across the community drug schemes and to ensure that community pharmacies are remunerated for the services they provide on behalf of the State.

The State has recently entered into contract negotiations with the Irish Pharmacy Union, under the agreed Framework of Engagement, published on 23 May 2025 (see www.gov.ie/en/department-of-health/publications/framework-of-engagement-between-the-department-of-health-the-health-service-executive-and-the-irish-pharmacy-union/).

Of course, any publicly funded pharmacy service expansion should address unmet public healthcare needs, improve access to existing public health services, and provide better value for money.