| Wednesday, 26 July 2006 | |
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MPs' report calls for radical re-think of NHS charges A new report published yesterday by the House of Commons Health Select Committee - which includes Dartford MP, Dr Howard Stoate - has condemned the cost of many NHS hospital car parking and bedside telephone services and called for action to reduce the costs being incurred by patients and their relatives. The MPs found that £78 million a year is generated from car parking charges, with wide discrepancies existing between the charges put in place by individual hospitals around the country. The committee has called on the Government to produce new guidance on car parking charges and recommended that regular patients or their visitors are given a season ticket that allows them reduced price or free parking. The costs of incoming calls to hospital bedside phones were described as ‘unacceptable’ by the committee, which has called for a range of measures to be put in place to prevent patients’ relatives and their friends being ‘penalised’ for making calls to patients. The report also criticised the current system of exemptions to prescription charges, which has been in place since 1968. The system is ‘full of anomalies’ the MPs concluded and is failing to protect many thousands of vulnerable, low-income patients who are suffering from serious debilitating diseases. The committee found that whilst patients with forms of diabetes and epilepsy for example pay nothing for their medication, other patients with asthma and hypertension and other chronic conditions have to pay – regardless of their income. The committee has recommended that a wholesale review of the prescription exemption system is carried out, and has asked the Government to consider the possibility of either abolishing prescription charges altogether, or of introducing a standard NHS formulary of medicines which are free to patients. The committee also called for the immediate introduction of a monthly prescription certificate, giving those on lower incomes unlimited prescriptions for £6.65 a month. Dr Stoate said; “the present system of NHS charges is profoundly flawed. In many cases we have lost sight of why they are in place and what purpose they serve, and large numbers of patients who shouldn’t be paying charges are having to spend a lot of money to get the medicines they need, and for other services such as car parking. The whole system needs a thorough overhaul and I hope that this report will help to drive home the message to the Government that doing nothing is not an option.”
Note
A full version of the Committee’s report is available at: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmhealth.htm
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© 2008 Dr Howard Stoate - Member of Parliament for Dartford
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