Update: Urgent Prescription Requests

I have run out of my medication – can I have an urgent prescription?

Due to the increasing numbers of patients requesting their prescription on an urgent basis, the practice has needed to instate an Urgent Prescription Policy

• Requests for prescriptions outside the normal prescription protocol impacts significantly on both doctors, and administration staff time as well as increasing the risk of a medication prescribing error.
• Unless a medication is clinically urgent, requests will be processed routinely (over 2 working days).
• As a surgery, we require a minimum of 2 working days to process a patients request for medication routinely.

Please respect our staff

• Our reception and administrative staff are to always follow this policy and they are not authorised to make any exceptions.
• Staff are not allowed to interrupt the duty GP during surgery.
• This policy is put in place to protect our patients and our staff, and we will not tolerate any abuse to or of our staff as they are following policy.

Many medications can safely be missed for a few days.

• Urgent prescription requests are requests for emergency medication which are needed within 24 hours to prevent the patient from becoming seriously ill.
• Urgent prescription requests are not requests for medication which have been ordered late as it is the patient’s responsibility to ensure that repeat prescription requests are ordered in time.
• This will ensure safe prescribing and optimise access to the clinical team.

If you forget to obtain a prescription for repeat medication and run out of important medicines, you may be able to get help from your Pharmacy.

• Under the Urgent Provision of Repeat Medication Service, Pharmacists may be able to supply you with a further cycle of a previously repeated medicine, without having to get a prescription from your GP.
• If you have run out of important medication, telephone your usual Pharmacy to check that they offer this service; if they don’t, they may either direct you to another Pharmacy who does provide it or ask you to phone 111 where you can request details of a local Pharmacy that provides the service.

Hospital Prescriptions

• When you are seen at the hospital and are given a hospital prescription, you should not leave the hospital without attending the hospital pharmacy to collect the medication.
• A hospital prescription is not valid in community pharmacies.
• Should you wish to have the prescription fulfilled by us instead, this will be processed routinely over 2 working days as urgently needed medication will be provided by the treating hospital.
• Some hospital medications are not licensed to be prescribed in general practice.

Holiday Medication

• Holidays are normally booked weeks or months in advance, therefore when preparing for your holiday, please remember to process a request for your routine medication allowing the normal 2 working days for processing.
• We can only provide a maximum of 3 X 1 month of prescriptions and we may request a patient to provide documents to support this request.
• We are unable to provide emergency prescriptions for holiday medication.

Monitoring

We will be recording all urgent requests in patient notes to monitor our repeat prescription service, meaning if patients do request regular urgent prescriptions, the practice teams will be aware, and patients will be challenged on this for non-compliance of medication.