NHS prescription penalty charge

[Knickerbockerglories]

I am hoping someone has some experience of this and can advise me…

my husband and I both take long term medication and have previously bought the yearly pre payment prescription card.

I switched to a monthly direct debit and thought I/we had switched his too, clearly we didn’t and he has been ticking the prepayment option for about a year without realising.

last month he got a penalty charge notice after an ‘automated check’ I phoned and explained and offered to back pay the years card, and they basically said tough he would get the fine. Fair enough, our mistake. I went online that day and set up his direct debit for the monthly option which auto renews each year- we won’t be caught out again!

problem is he’s just had another charge notice for the month after the last one… so probably another penalty fine… will these continue for the full year or so he missed so be about £1,000 in total?

if they look at the system they can see it was an error after paying the annual charge regularly for years before…. Do I ring them again or will that just highlight the other times (which he’s more than covered in the first fine).

I know he’s technically in the wrong but it was a genuine mistake and he’s paid the fine and set up the DD option to make sure it doesn’t happen again…

any advice? Has anyone had anything similar?

It is rolled out in 95% pharmacies now. I work for the NHS. I have experience of working with the exemption checking process, so what I say is probably more up to date/accurate than most posts on here. It's also interesting to see the variation in how pharmacies are operating. There have been comms about all this stuff but I wonder how effective they have been.

You might not see them do the check, seeing where their laptop or PC is. It's on a database. One click is all that's needed and it will say whether the patient is exempt or not based on the range of checks it can do up front. The pharmacy won't know why you are exempt, just that you have flagged as such. If you are not flagging as exempt the form should be signed and sent off to NHSBSA. It's a quick process the check and in theory it makes a pharmacy's life easier because many patients don't know if they are exempt or not eg. Can't remember if their certificate is in date and the system will say yes or no straight away without having to faff around with the pharmacy or patient trying to find out.

Do they not just automatically renew I pay monthly and it does for that. Does it not just take a year amount out if you've done it before? Maybe check past payments on your bank

Pharmacies don't care if you are exempt or not. It makes no odds to them whether you pay. There is no repercussion for them if you say you're exempt and you are not.

Their responsibility is to collect the FP10 with a signature if appropriate (ie. Not filtered out by the first check) so that it can be retrospectively checked when sent to NHSBSA.

They don't need to ask for your certificate number because they should get a 'yes' on RTEC, and if they aren't using RTEC for whatever reason you just need to sign the form and they send it off and NHSBSA will identify whether or not you've got an exemption as part of their process.

@Agreeable

of course it's not. There has to deliberate intention for it to be fraud.

@EnglishRain

But they have obviously not done a check, when they hand me the medication whilst saying you have an exemption certificate - when I know that my certificate has run out! I carried the paper copy in my handbag for the full year so checked the expiry date at start of January.

I have never signed the FP10 in recent years, since my prescription requests were sent digitally from GP to pharmacy.

I am so glad that I am now 60 and fully exempt. I know that they may change the rules, but hopefully it will not include people who are already exempt on age.

If they just charged you for prescriptions you'd get a lot of people thinking that they'd just tick the pre-payment box, and not pay. If they get caught, well, they pay prescription as normal, if they don't then they're quids in.

I agree but a £100 fine plus the prescription/dental costs for genuine error is unreasonable.

Its more than a speeding fixed penalty fine, speeding endangers life.

The annual one doesn't auto renew

Hello, I’m in a similar situation as this but with a missed 3 month certificate. Did you have to pay multiple fines in the end or did they cancel it? Thanks in advance 😩

Interesting to read this 12m on. My pharmacy has changed hands and I asked them a few weeks ago whether there is an automatic check as I noticed my prescription label now has an F for prepayment certificate. I've just recently renewed mine.
They told me that no, there is no automatic check/link, they just put F on because they know I generally tick that box. Seems highly error-prone to me but this is why they said.

It’s an innocent mistake but you need to pay the fines. You are both adults. Why should the nhs lose money because you didn’t do something correctly.

What is the number ?

Hey so did you get successive fines or just one, I want to try dispute the second month fine that we have been give separately