October 4th 2026

By Ailsa Colquhoun

DDA26: Understanding your drug statement

There are three key things to take away from your drug statement, DDA Board Member Dr Raj Kanwar said in his DDA 2026 Conference presentation, How practices are paid.

These are:

• Check your dispensing fees. Look at how prescriptions are allocated between your dispensing practitioners. Do those numbers make sense? If one doctor has 3,000 prescriptions and another has only 300, is there a legitimate explanation, or is there an allocation problem like the one we discovered in our own practice
• Reconcile your prescription charges. Look at the contra on your Drug Statement and compare it with what you've actually collected from patients. If there's a discrepancy, investigate it. We discovered that we were potentially losing around £600 simply because we started looking.
• Benchmark your dispensing performance regularly. Make sure you're comparing your purchasing costs with the correct month's dispensing activity, rather than simply looking at whatever happened to arrive in your bank account.

He told the conference audience: “You don't necessarily have to do all of this yourself. Your practice manager, dispensary manager or accountant may be able to help. But as dispensing partners, I think we should at least understand what we're looking at and know which questions to ask.

“And hopefully, unlike my annual accountant meeting, you won't all understand this perfectly for the next two hours and then have completely forgotten it by next week!”

The presentation focused on using the contra figure on your drug statement to identify losses due to prescription charge wrong group movements, and why bank receipts mislead.

The key areas to look at are:

• From the drug statement - Basic prices, discount, VAT allowance, fees, contra
• From practice records - Matching-period wholesaler invoices, drug rebates, VAT rebate and charges collected at the till
• From payroll/accounts - Dispensary staff costs and relevant overheads.

Concluding, he advised delegates to benchmark monthly. “Don’t wait for the accountant,” he said.

View the presentation slides and the audio from the DDA Conference.