I had the "prescription review" problem when my GP retired and we were all shuffled to a health centre. It's taken two years for them to fully understand that while drugs do, definitely, need regular reviews, I'm not going to stop needing to eat.
It seems that, in the last few years, the NHS has tightened up and GPs are no longer supposed to prescribe more than a month's supply of a drug.
My practice has ralented over the daily tablets that come in tubs of sixty, but is still refusing to give me more than four at a time of the weekly pills.
Apparently, it's to avoid waste. It strikes me they could easily finesse the policy and save everyone some hassle by letting people have three month's supply of stuff they've been taking for literally years.
Yes - mine do that too. It's really bloody annoying, particularly as I can't do any of the 'get repeats delivered to a given pharmacy' tricks because I don't always use the same pharmacy.
I live in a village. I like living in a village; it's quiet and peaceful.
However, it has bugger all infrastructure.
One of the very few infrastructural perks is that, because there's no pharmacist in a five mile radius my GP has its own dispensary tacked on the side. The computer systems are linked so prescriptions get transmitted digitally. When I drop off a repeat prescription request, I go back a day or two later and the drugs are waiting.
Even then, having to get stuff a month at a time is pointless and infuriating; I can well imagine it's much worse if you have to visit GP twice then visit pharmacy twice. (Some of the stuff I need tends not to be routinely stocked.)
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<yorkshiremen count="4">Two years? Lucky. My surgery still hasn't got its collective head round that one in six...</yorkshiremen>My practice has ralented over the daily tablets that come in tubs of sixty, but is still refusing to give me more than four at a time of the weekly pills.
Apparently, it's to avoid waste. It strikes me they could easily finesse the policy and save everyone some hassle by letting people have three month's supply of stuff they've been taking for literally years.
However, it has bugger all infrastructure.
One of the very few infrastructural perks is that, because there's no pharmacist in a five mile radius my GP has its own dispensary tacked on the side. The computer systems are linked so prescriptions get transmitted digitally. When I drop off a repeat prescription request, I go back a day or two later and the drugs are waiting.
Even then, having to get stuff a month at a time is pointless and infuriating; I can well imagine it's much worse if you have to visit GP twice then visit pharmacy twice. (Some of the stuff I need tends not to be routinely stocked.)