From the Upwell Health Clinic Newsletter:
"There is a second change coming at the same time as electronic prescribing. This will affect those of you who have asked us to provide you with a private prescription for your drugs, where the cost has been less than a prescription charge.
"The BMA have advised us of a legal opinion they have obtained about the legality of us offering you a private prescription. That ruling has indicated that we are in breach of NHS regulations if we continue to do so and therefore, reluctantly, we are going to cease offering these once electronic prescribing starts.
"We previously believed that, provided we offered you an NHS prescription but you preferred a private one, we were complying with the rules, but it is now clear that that is not the case. Unfortunately this will mean an increased cost for some of you. As you probably know, those of you not exempt from prescription charges have to pay a charge (currently £8.40) for each item on the prescription. If you have more than 12 items in a year on prescription it is cheaper to purchase a prepayment certificate. This costs £104 for a year. You can pay this over a year by direct debit in ten instalments of £10.40 monthly. Once you have this ALL your prescriptions are covered so that includes any acute prescriptions you have, for example for antibiotics or pain killers, as well as the regular drugs you have each month for problems such as asthma and high blood pressure.
"We will not be able to increase the quantity of drugs you obtain on your repeat prescription to offset the charge; it is a clear expectation of our CCG and the NHS generally that repeat prescriptions should be for a month's quantity of tablets. ….. "
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Topic: GPs and Private Prescriptions (Read 3902 times)