... as are prescription charges

Prescription charges in Northern Ireland, which were frozen at £6.85 in April this year, will be cut to £3 from tomorrow. This reduction will be followed later next year by the abolition of prescription charges.

Stormont health minister Michael McGimpsey said that reductions would make a real difference for people who needed to buy medication. He also added that abolition would end the "inequitable system which ranked one person's suffering above another's". He went on to say that the cost of the reductions would be met "from within existing budgets" and no existing service would suffer.

Scotland's prescription charges were reduced to £5 in April, with a promise that they would be abolished by 2011. As Audlem Online's spoof story on April 1st highlighted, prescription charges in Wales were abolished in April. Next time you go to the chemist's and hand over your £7.10, remember what the residents in the rest of the UK are paying.

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