The decision to end State funding of medical blister packs supplied by pharmacies will see elderly people hit with a new monthly bill of up to \u20ac50 from January, the D\u00e1il has heard.<\/p>\n
Sinn F\u00e9in’s Pearse Doherty said the move will punish vulnerable people and it will push up their costs even more including those suffering with dementia.<\/p>\n
“It is not right. It is not fair and it needs to be stopped,” he said.<\/p>\n
Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin responded by saying that “more generally” the Government has done a lot to reduce the cost of medicine.<\/p>\n
The Taoiseach said the Government would look at any situation where a patient faces hardship.<\/p>\n
He told the D\u00e1il there is a difference between phased dispensing of medication and monitored dosing and the latter was never formally funded.<\/p>\n
However, he did indicate that the Government would discuss this matter again with the HSE.<\/p>\n
Labour Health spokesperson Marie Sherlock said that not putting a State-funded blister pack service in place was a “recipe for confusion”.<\/p>\n
“The failure to put in place state-funded blister pack services is short-sighted and a complete contradiction to the principles of care in the community,” she said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“This gross inefficiency in the lack of state support for blister packs will hurt the most vulnerable: older people, people with disabilities, and people on social welfare payments who will struggle to afford an additional \u20ac50 per month to pay for a blister pack service.<\/p>\n
“The Minister must urgently intervene to ensure that vulnerable people who are reliant on blister packs can avail of those services this winter.<\/p>\n
“There is additional funding of \u20ac50m for the Community Pharmacy Agreement next year. It is crucial that some of this additional funding be allocated to vulnerable patient hardship blister pack services.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The decision to end State funding of medical blister packs supplied by pharmacies will see elderly people hit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[134,524,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-178076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-medication","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}