online prescribing booklet

WalterMitty

I am looking for an online version of the booklet that doctors use when prescribing listing all drugs licenced in ireland . I remember it being online in past but cant seem to find it now.

RobFowl

WalterMitty wrote: »

I am looking for an online version of the booklet that doctors use when prescribing listing all drugs licenced in ireland . I remember it being online in past but cant seem to find it now.

The BNF is online but is subscription based.
http://bnf.org/bnf/index.htm

The free booklet MIMS which doctors get every month is not available on line.

Kurtosis

Not a prescribing booklet as such, but the Irish Medicines Board website contains information on all medicines. You can search on their website under the "Human" section on the bottom left of the home page.

locum-motion

WalterMitty wrote: »

I am looking for an online version of the booklet that doctors use when prescribing listing all drugs licenced in ireland . I remember it being online in past but cant seem to find it now.

The Irish Medicines Board website is the place to go for details of what's licenced in Ireland, since they're the body that issues the licences.
On their website you can find links to the PIL (Patient Information Leaflet) and SPC (Summary of Product Characteristics) for each product. The PIL is info in layman's terms that the patient might need to know. The SPC is more complex info that a doctor/pharmacist might use when prescribing/dispensing it.
IIRC, the links can be found via the left hand side menu on the site, under 'Human Medicines Listing'.

WalterMitty

im actually looking for prices that the drugs cost, i remember seeing in MIMS the price that the drug costs under medical card/GMS schemes. ? Is there a HSE site detailing the amounts paid by them for such drugs and the amounts that a private patient may have to pay?
Cheers.

WalterMitty

ignore last post, found what im looking for.
http://www.sspcrs.ie/druglist/search.jsp

locum-motion

The amount that a private patient has to pay is a matter for the pharmacist and the patient.
It's a private transaction between a person who sets a price and a person who decides that they either will or will not pay that price.
There is no prescribed (excuse the pun) price. To prescribe a price would be to interfere with free market competition and would be illegal.

Sid_Justice

There are no guidelines on how much pharmacists charge? They can literally charge what ever they want?

locum-motion

WalterMitty wrote: »

ignore last post, found what im looking for.
http://www.sspcrs.ie/druglist/search.jsp

The prices on that site are NOT the cost prices of the drugs.
They are the prices that the HSE uses as their base to calculate the reimbursement they will pay to pharmacists and are approximately 9% LESS than the pharmacy buys the meds for.

locum-motion

Sid_Justice wrote: »

There are no guidelines on how much pharmacists charge? They can literally charge what ever they want?

No, they can charge however much they think the market will bear.
In this respect, a pharmacy is no different from any other business: the business owner sets the highest price he thinks he can get without scaring customers off to his competitor. It's the same in the supermarket, clothes shop, restaurant, butcher etc etc etc.
The difference is that in a pharmacy, the VAST majority of the goods (in this case, prescription medicines) are sold to a single customer (the HSE) who is empowered by law to set its own price, which - as I noted above in another post - is based on a price that is lower than the pharmacy can even buy the stuff for.
Therefore those patients who DO pay for their own drugs are effectively subsidising those that don't.
Another difference is that - despite allegations to the contrary in a national newspaper recently - pharmacies DO NOT apply a mark-up that is in the hundreds of percent. Clothes shops for example routinely apply 2 or even 3 hundred percent markups. That's why they can sell leftover stuff off at half price at the end of the season.

Sid_Justice

so in practice is it worth shopping around if you are a private patient? 20 tablets of a common antibiotic could be 16 euro in one shop and 32 in another?

locum-motion

Sid_Justice wrote: »

so in practice is it worth shopping around if you are a private patient? 20 tablets of a common antibiotic could be 16 euro in one shop and 32 in another?

You wouldn't find a difference THAT big, I'm sure, but yeah, you could try shopping around a bit.

lonestargirl

Sid_Justice wrote: »

so in practice is it worth shopping around if you are a private patient? 20 tablets of a common antibiotic could be 16 euro in one shop and 32 in another?

Also if you have a repeat script you can fill it all together and only pay one dispensing fee

WalterMitty

I know those prices arent private prices but i just want to see the relative prices of drugs. Obviously margins will vary from pharmacist to pharmacist and anyone charging excessive margins will loose a lot of business.