Does your doctor send prescriptions to pharmacy?

pattycake

Both my husband and I have medications which we take daily. We are registered with a local pharmacy and they take care of it completely. I am on a monthly repeat and I have a little card which tells me when my meds are ready for collection. My DH is on two monthly but it is the same situation.

We do nothing except go to pick up the items. In fact, they would deliver them but we are quite capable of going to fetch them, thank goodness.

AshfordSteve

Hedgehog99 wrote: »

My doctors surgery has just started doing this.

It being the 21st Century, there was I thinking my prescription would be sent electronically to any pharmacy I chose.

Pah!

Apparently:
1) I can only use certain pharmacies who are "linked" with my surgery.
2) My surgery then contacts the pharmacy within a day or two
3) Within another day or two the pharmacist goes to my surgery to fetch prescription
4) I can finally go and collect it about a week later

...and this is supposed to be more convenient for the patient?
Am I not trusted with the prescription?
Is it to reduce fraud?
Is it because pharmacies don't seem to keep enough stocks these days & have to order medicines in?

Personally, I liked having the piece of paper I could take anywhere. I could change my plans and go to a different pharmacy if it was more convenient and I got my medication the same day.

If someone can explain why this system has come in, and that the timescale will improve, I'd be grateful.

The electronic prescription service (EPS) has a number of drivers behind its introduction. One is safety - pharmacy staff no longer need to transfer drug information from a paper prescription to the computer as it is done automatically (but dose information may still need to be edited). Another reason is to improve administration within the NHS - at present all prescriptions are sorted into doctor name, boxed up and sent to the pricing bureau where there are all scanned in before being priced - EPS avoids this as all the information is transmitted electronically from the pharmacy to the pricing bureau. It also avoids the issue of a box of prescriptions going missing - which can be worth £250,000 to a busy pharmacy. Finally EPS is supposed to be more convenient to patients as your prescription can be sent to any pharmacy in England that is using the system.

OP, is your surgery definitely using electronic prescriptions? If they are then someone does not understand the system properly. EPS scripts can be sent to any pharmacy in England that is using the system. There are far more pharmacies that are live at present than GP surgeries, and I highly doubt that any pharmacies in an area that is using EPS would not also be using it. My pharmacy was able to process EPS scripts well before our local surgeries. Staff at any pharmacy or GP surgery who are using EPS are able to change nomination settings (with the patient's permission). I work in Kent, and have had EPS scripts from surgeries in Cornwall and London, and I have also changed nominations for people who are visiting family for six weeks or so. It is possible to change where a prescription is going to after it has been issued, as long as it has not been claimed for and staff in both pharmacies know what they are doing.

EPS should reduce the time it takes prescriptions to travel from surgery to pharmacy. The surgery still needs to generate the prescriptions in the same manner as before (hence the 48 hours), but once the GP has electronically signed the prescription by putting in a PIN the script will be sent to the pharmacy. If it is an acute prescription it will go straight away, if it is a repeat it may wait for a couple of hours. The pharmacy still needs the same amount of time from receipt of prescription to process it, but different pharmacies vary in how efficient they are (my branch typically gets scripts in the evening, they get labelled that evening and are dispensed the next day. It rarely takes us longer than 24 hours to dispense surgery scripts).

Stock levels are not always at the level the pharmacy would like for a number of reasons. There have been several common medicines that have had manufacturing issues with them recently, and with branded medicines the manufacturers sometimes put quotas on them, which do not necessarily bear any relation to how many you usually use in a month.

There is one potentially massive downside to EPS. When it is fully rolled out, prescriptions will be able to be sent from the GP surgery to any pharmacy located in England. In some cases this will make life a lot easier for patients such as commuters who will be able to have their prescriptions sent to a pharmacy near to where they work. However there are also distance selling pharmacies, such as pharmacy2u. These are based in warehouses, receive prescriptions electronically and then deliver them by post. Pharmacy2u also have a habit of sending out letters to people living in areas where the GPs are using EPS, advertising their services (which I don't object to), however they use the NHS logo on their letters, which has led to some patients getting confused and signing up for their service thinking it is an official NHS service when in reality they have the same relationship with the NHS as any other pharmacy.

Internet pharmacy may be beneficial for some patients, but it has the potential to decimate the community pharmacy network, unless there are big changes to pharmacy funding. The most vulnerable may lose access to their local pharmacy, delivery services may be impacted, and availability of face to face advice may be reduced. I am also not clear on how internet pharmacies will resolve issues with prescriptions, which can sometimes be difficult enough to sort out when you are the local pharmacist dealing with the local GPs who have known you for years. Internet pharmacies are also not ideal for urgent prescriptions.

Finally, it is the patient's choice whether their prescriptions are electronic ones or not - you can always opt out.

(Apologies for length - community pharmacist who has had several years experience dealing with EPS and so knows it inside out)

SailorSam

They asked me a few months ago in the pharmacy did i want to join up with this, a couple of times i dropped the repeat prescription into the doctors then they said in the Chemist i only need drop it in there and they'll look after it.

jenniewb

I find this service really helpful- sadly the pharmacy I've been using for the past 10 years and where my prescriptions are all sent to is closing in a year but it tends to be really useful if I need an emergency prescription; say for example I call the 111 service and they prescribe me some medication (given on what I've taken in the past which isn't a repeat prescription) they then automatically send it through to a pharmacy and I can collect it with minimum wait because the time it takes me to get to the pharmacy even in a cab is enough for them to have everything prepared.


I do need to still wait about 4 days for a repeat prescription to be prepared (I request it by the pharmacy who will then put in my request to the GP, then it's a 2 day wait for it to be written out and a further day or so for the pharmacy to have it ready- unless they have to order it).


I find the pharmacy thing generally reliable, my pharmacy know my past repeat prescriptions so don't tend to always be out of stock and find the service far more useful especially in an emergency when the GP surgery is normally closed and to normally collect needed medication like that I'd either end up at A&E or if there is space left, waiting a long while to see the walk-in-duty-Doctor which is the last thing most people want to do when they are already feeling very unwell.

InsideInsurance

We moved to a new area and didnt change GP instantly. Our old GP used EPS and as we tend to use Boots as our pharmacy they'd already got the system so we thought it'd all be ok but what we didnt know was that none of the local GPs had started using EPS. How wrong we were.

Firstly, Boots claimed only 1 person had been trained on how to use it and so if he wasnt in the store they all looked confused and said to try again another time.

Secondly, the first time they received an electronic prescription they printed it off and then said they couldnt dispense it because the GP hadnt signed it and refused to do so until the GP surgery faxed over the authorisation.

Finally, they are just generally incompetent and dont "spot" the prescription coming in on the system and as most our meds are not normal "off the shelf" when we went in they'd get flustered and say to come back in 2-3 days as the prescription "just came in this morning" and we need to order the medications etc.

Did get round to changing GP to a local one, they still dont use EPS and do the old fashioned way of coming in person to each surgery every day to drop off new requests and collect the prescriptions and things work much better now.

System

My chemist does it electronically... but they still manage to get it wrong.

SailorSam

I'm bl00dy annoyed.
I joined this get your repeat prescriptions straight from the Chemist.
I dropped a repeat prescrition into the chemist over a week ago now, i think it was the Wednesday. When i took it in i'd already run out of one of tablets i needed, but 'cos of that operation i had on my eye on 2nd Feb i haven't been able to get out of the house. Been the chemist this morning and there's nothing there, they had a record of me dropping it off but said i needed to phone the Doctor. Just come off the phone with them and she says there's nothing wrong at the their end, the Chemist should give it out. I asked ... 'you haven't got it sitting there have you'.......... Oh yes sorry.
That's the second time now. The doctors about 3mls away. I passed that way during the week, if they'd only tell me i'll call instead of going on this automatic system, but they say it should be ok.
Gggrrrr.

pathtofreedom

I have been using this service with tesco for repeat prescriptions for the past few months. When I went last week though they said the rules had changed and I need to phone the doctor to request it, then phone tesco to let them know to collect it, then call again to see if it is ready or not. I've had problems trying to get through to tesco on the phone before though so I don't think that is going to work.

I need to find out if that is just tesco it has changed for, or if it is all chemists round here, as I work it was very helpful not having to have time off to go pick up prescriptions, so I hope they aren't withdrawing the service all together.

grunnie

Judi wrote: »

My chemist does it electronically... but they still manage to get it wrong.

My chemist gets it wrong too - all the time. I have quite a walk to the chemist so it is a nuisance. They don't deliver them. I am on a yearly repeat and am supposed to collect my pills whenever I need them. I take 5 different pills twice a day and should have in theory the same amount of each but it varies as have 33 of one type up to 242 of another. All should be the same amount. I tried to sort this today with the chemist and she just said she would give me 39 of the one I had least of. That will just muddle up the amounts for next time. I also take 2 other pills and one is an antibiotic so I have to phone the surgery and the prescription is collected by the chemist and I get it about 5 days later. They make something Complicated but it should in theory be easier.

mandragora_2

We are in a remote area, and our surgery issues the medicines, once the GP has issued the prescription - all well and good when they have the medicines in stock, however, even though I use the same medicine every year for hay fever, and even though it's always at the same time of year, they don't keep it in stock.

What this means is that I have a 16-mile round trip to the surgery to see the GP, and then need to do another trip five days later to pick up my medicines. I drive to town every day to work (12 miles in the other direction!) and so I asked to be able to take the prescription with me, to a town-centre pharmacy, so that they could fill it for me. The receptionist wasn't at all happy with this, and told me I 'couldn't' do it, and I 'had' to use the pharmacy at the surgery. When I queried this, and asked a GP friend, I found out that this wasn't true. It's your prescription, you can take that piece of paper to whichever local pharmacy suits you - the surgery don't have the right to insist you use the service they are tied in to. In their case, they felt that they wanted to keep offering the pharmacy service at the surgery for the benefit of older, more restricted patients who don't go out to local towns, but that to 'make the service pay' everyone 'needs' to use it.

I wasn't happy to argue with the surgery, because, really, who wants to argue with their doctor, and while I could see their point, I thought there was a bit of emotional blackmail going on in the stance they'd taken. Once I'd found out the facts for myself, I did politely explain that if they couldn't provide me with the medicines I needed at a time and in a way that was convenient for me, that I would be exercising my right to take the prescription elsewhere so I could have the meds more quickly and easily. There hasn't been an issue with it ever since, but I do feel the receptionist was happy to exploit the fact that people aren't really sure of what they are entitled to.