Emergency service puts pharmacies in need

14.08.2012 10:16

The pharmacists in Rhineland-Palatinate feel like they are being paraded by politics. The reason for this is that they asked the Federal Ministry of Economics (BMWi) to increase their pay by €1.04 per package delivered, to which the ministry responded with an offer of 25 cents.

The pharmacists justified their demand by saying that the fee of €8.10 per pack had not been increased since 2004. However, €2.05 of this must be paid to the statutory health insurance companies as a “reward” for paying the pharmacy bill on time. The calculation presented by the pharmacists showed that from 2004 to 2012, costs increased by 14.4 percent and personnel costs increased by 18 percent due to inflation alone. Overall, the additional effort over the eight years amounts to 21.1 percent.

At an extraordinary general meeting of the Rhineland-Palatinate Pharmacists' Association on August 8th in Mainz, a resolution was unanimously passed calling on politicians to recognize the legitimate demands of pharmacists and to increase the packaging fee. The resolution states that the BMWi's planned increase in remuneration of 25 cents after 9 years of stagnation is completely inadequate because it in no way takes into account the increased administrative effort in pharmacies just to implement the discount agreements. Statutory health insurance claims to have saved 1.6 billion euros in 2011 alone.

With such a “petty amount” it would not be possible to provide employees with wage compensation commensurate with the inflation rate. The chairman of the Rhineland Pharmacists' Association criticized that it was also not possible to pay adequate compensation to on-site pharmacies - especially in rural areas - which made a cost-intensive contribution to ensuring the supply of medicines by taking on night and emergency services -Pfalz, Theo Hasse. He called on state politicians, in particular the Ministry of Social Affairs, to take the initiative and thus ensure a flat-rate, cost-covering payment at the federal level for the night and emergency service to ensure the supply of medicines in the rural Rhineland-Palatinate.

“Last year, the number of pharmacies in Rhineland-Palatinate reached its lowest level since 1987 at 1,102 pharmacies. Overall, we had 17 fewer companies in 2011 than in the previous year. In the first half of this year, nine pharmacies had to close without opening a single new one. “That says a lot about what the economic situation is like,” emphasized Hasse.