Pharmacies in Blagoevgrad region are ready for effective strike action because of problems in the retail trade of medicinal products. This was announced for BTA by the Deputy Chairman of the Management Board of the Regional Pharmaceutical College – Blagoevgrad Dr. Konstantin Kachulev.
The collegium points out that if the tension escalates, there is a real danger that pharmacies will terminate their contracts with the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF) and settlements will be left without NHIF services. This will reflect directly on the drug supply to patients, they add from there.
Among the problems that demand immediate measures from the competent institutions, the RFK – Blagoevgrad indicate that during the issuance of interim reports on the completed prescriptions from the pharmacies to the NHIF, a software problem is detected, which reflects on the financial health of the pharmacies. This means that the NHIF stops payment for certain prescriptions. However, no problems and errors in the execution of the prescriptions are noticed in the pharmacy software, the college explains. For the period from April 1 to 15, the submitted data on prescription dropouts from pharmacies is worth tens of thousands of BGN. On the amounts blocked by the NHIF, the pharmacies in the district also owe value added tax (VAT), which is a total of about 10,000 BGN.
The college says this system is for managing supply business processes for big pharmaceutical companies, but not for tracking counterfeit drugs. According to Kachulev, such have not been established on the territory of the country – neither before the introduction of the system, nor after.
The RFK – Blagoevgrad says that in the last few months the cases of fines from the Specialized Electronic System for Tracking and Analysis of Medicinal Products (SESPA), which range from BGN 15,000 to BGN 25,000, have become more frequent. This puts pharmacies in a financial knock-out and hits their reputation, the college says.
Pharmacists are demanding measures and correcting the wrong data coming from the Bulgarian Medicines Validation Organization (BOVL) to the NHIF, after the National Health Information System (NHIS) issues a national reference number (NRN) of dispensing after passing all controls. Their request is that the competent persons carry out the relevant checks for all prescriptions canceled as a result of wrongly submitted information from the BOVL to the NHIF, for all pharmacies in the territory of the Blagoevgrad region.
Tags: Pharmacies Blagoevgradsko ready effective strike action
