The ICPSA requires that, before 1 July each year, community pharmacy providers/provider representatives and HNZ acknowledge that each national annual agreement review (NAAR) round will consider reasonable cost pressure adjustments.
It was therefore surprising last year when HNZ unilaterally announced to all community pharmacy contract holders on 27 June of its intention to apply a 2.51% price uplift offer without supporting rationale or discussion with us. We immediately sought, through the NAAR 2024 process, an explanation of how this offer was decided by the HNZ Board.
HNZ chose to treat our request for this explanation as an Official Information Act (OIA) request. While some strictly limited information was ultimately provided by HNZ under this OIA request in mid-August, this raised more questions than it provided answers.
This led to us escalating our process and decision-making concerns relating to the uplift offer to the HNZ Commissioner in early September, followed by a further OIA request to HNZ at the end of September, due to significant remaining unexplained concerns.
This second OIA request was important as it sought to understand why community pharmacy only received a 2.51% uplift offer when HNZ considered that a reasonable cost pressures uplift for community pharmacy for 2024/25 was 5.62%.
We escalated this second OIA request to the Ombudsman last December, because no reply had been received from HNZ within the 20 working days OIA response timeline requirement. A reply was subsequently received from HNZ in late February 2025. It was only at this point that we received the necessary transparency on HNZ’s uplift offer of 2.51% on 27 June, as announced some eight months earlier.
We are working actively with HNZ as part of NAAR 2025, to ensure that HNZ’s seriously flawed approach to NAAR 2024 from a process and transparency perspective, and with its significant adverse outcome for community pharmacy, is not repeated this year.