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- Page navigation anchor for Repeat dispensingRepeat dispensing
This facility has been available in England since 2003, although uptake was very limited - three practices in the East of England for many years, with some evidence of increased uptake across one CCG area recently.
This system has the potential to decrease the surgery workload and cost of processing but it's debatable what the advantages are at the pharmacy end. I didn't see this included in the paper.
Does it need evaluated against the criteria identified, and it uptake increased or the whole system binned as not good value for money.
Competing Interests: None declared. - Page navigation anchor for Longer- versus shorter- duration prescriptionsLonger- versus shorter- duration prescriptionsThank you for highlighting that 28-day prescriptions might not be the "magic-bullet" for managing issues around adherence, perseverance and wasted medicine. I hope this review might lead onto further analysis, evaluation and research on the impact of longer prescriptions lengths on patients and GP practices.It is worth noting that the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) is only for England community pharmacy and does not negotiate on behalf of the community pharmacy in the other home nations. The authors might have given the incorrect impression that guidance to GPs to prescribe 28 days is the same across the whole of the UK.In parts of Scotland the NHS Boards have worked with GPs to ensure there is a consistent prescription length (particularly where patients are prescribed many different medicines) and in consultation with the GPs, patients/carers and community pharmacists 56 days is now considered a good prescription length. This frequency of prescribing is less disruptive and cumbersome than 28 day and it is not so long that patient’s have to cope with unfeasibly large quantities of medicines. This is particularly true for those medicines used to treat long-term conditions.Where the packaging of the medicine encourages longer prescriptions, such as for oral contraceptives longer prescriptions lengths are used and in Scotland some GPs will p...Show MoreCompeting Interests: None declared.
- Page navigation anchor for Impact of issuing longer- versus shorter- duration prescriptions: a systematic reviewImpact of issuing longer- versus shorter- duration prescriptions: a systematic reviewI appreciate that the experience of one Practice may not extrapolate to the country at large but may be worth sharing. In the early days of Fundholding we continued our historical practice of supplying two month prescriptions on repeat. Despite major efforts we were unable to reduce our prescribing cost. We were pressurised to change to monthly repeats by the prescribing advisers and over the following year our prescribing costs reduced by 10%. Sadly, by then it was too late to reap the rewards ourselves and we were simply left with the extra work of issuing twice as many prescriptions. However, we continued because the savings were maintained and it just seemed to work much better.Competing Interests: None declared.