Electronic Prescriptions

Posted on July 13th, 2017

As most of you will be aware, there is a high volume of prescriptions coming through the practice on a daily basis. I recently sent an email advising patients that we can no longer accomodate urgent on the day prescriptions for this reason and the response to this has been fantastic, most patients now are managing their prescriptions better or approaching the pharmacy for a temporary supply until the prescription is ready. So we thanks you for your support with this.

Obviously we are still trying to manage a high volume of prescriptions and trying to find the best way to do this without increasing the turn around time as no one wants this to happen. After a disucssion with the local pharmacy we feel it may be the best option to send as many prescription electronically as possible, this saves the GP so much time signing them. For those of you who are unclear how this would work, here is what happens:

We would nominate the name of your usual pharmacy on our system, then when you come in and order your prescription (or order it on line via patient access) we would process it in the normal way but it would get sent electronically (directly) to your nominated pharmacy. So, instead of patients coming to the surgery to pick up a printed prescription when its ready, you go directly to the pharmacy after the 48 working hours and just collect your medication from there. Cutting out the middle man so to speak. You have the freedom to nominate the pharmacy of your choice. Eventually, we wont have a choice with this, ALL prescriptions in the future will be electronic so perhaps we should start making these changes now in order to support the local pharmacy and the GP practice. There are other changes we could make instead of this but unfortunately it wouldnt have a positive impact on Willaston pharmacy and im sure like the practice, you want to do what you can to keep the local pharmacy in business.

Im sure most of you have had a less than positive experience using the EPS (electronic prescribing service) in the past when it was first introduced, as did we in the surgery, thankfully since then it has improved alot and we feel confident now we can turn things around. The other downfall is obviously the combination of some patients requesting it to go EPS and others wanting to collect from surgery and generally due to human error (we hold our hands up) the script destination has gotten mixed up ie prescriptions meant to be in the pharmacy end up staying in the surgery and vice versa. We have taken this all on board and want to make it as hassle free as possible for our patients and with the support of yourselves and the local pharmacy I feel we can make it work by having everyones prescriptions electronic. So what we would like to propose is that ALL prescriptions go electronically in the future, order in your usual way, then after 48 working hours go straight to the pharmacy to collect. We would be hopeing to have this rolled out by the begining of August.

What to do next:

We would like all patients to nominate a pharmacy (where you would like to collect your prescription from), you can do this in your local pharmacy or by calling into the surgery. Or due to the change over we will accept pharmacy nominations via email sent to : wcccg.willastonsurgery@nhs.net . If anyone has any strong objections to this or wants to discuss further please feel free to call the surgery or send an email where we can discuss further. You can also put any thoughts to the PPG lead Mr John Woodrow who im sure will be happy to discuss with the practice on your behalf before the 31st July. If we dont hear anything by that date we will assume there are no major objections and plan to proceed. The only exception to this would be with Controlled Drugs ie diazepam, Temazepam, Zopiclone etc where they need to be signed for so wouldnt be sent electronically, however, most of the pharmacys sign for these on your behalf as long as they are not out of area. Willaston, Cubbins, Boots Neston, Deeside will all sign for these on your behalf however, if your pharmacy if further afield you will need to sign and collect yourself as normal.

Once again we thank you for your ongoing support in moving the practice forward

The next PPG meeting will be held on Monday 4th Sept from 7pm in Willaston Memorial Hall.

Many thanks