I am a community pharmacist and was alarmed by the sudden rush towards free prescriptions and the fact that it will cause a £13m hole in the healthcare budget.

I believe that this will seriously affect the Health Service. The money has to come from somewhere to cover this massive extra financial burden and those hit hardest will be those campaigning for the use of new and expensive treatments for their chronic conditions.

One only has to look at what this additional fiscal strain has done to the Welsh healthcare system — large rises have been reported in the prescribing of items which people could simply have bought themselves. Most reports from Wales suggest that this publicly well-received practice is, in effect, eroding the healthcare system from within.

I think of the number of scripts those already exempt hand in for such items as baby food (items like Cow and Gate Omneo Comfort — not just speciality foods for metabolic disorders), wax-softening ear drops, aspirin, gluten-free bread and pasta and other over-the-counter medicines.

The Government recently halted the wasteful minor ailments scheme, which was a good move as I have seen numerous contractors advising patients that the paracetamol suspension that they were about to buy could instead be ‘prescribed’ for them, meaning the state was hit not just for the cost of the bottle, but consultation and dispensing fees were added. One contractor I heard of saw the minor ailments scheme as a way to print money.

The way forward is to review those chronic conditions which merit free scripts — asthma, cancerous conditions and others could all be considered for exemption from fees.

This should not mean that all medication should be free, but rather that which is essential to manage a condition on a long-term basis, both in treating the condition and dealing with the symptoms. Prescribers should be encouraged to be more responsible with the items they issue, not just capitulating to the sometimes very selfish demands of patients.

I hope that, through better management of public money, we will experience wider availability of new therapeutics rather than the whole population never having to pay for co-codamols ever again.

Steven McRoberts

Belfast