From Thursday 1 February 2018 pharmacies, online pharmacies and suppliers of medical appliances will no-longer be able to order repeat prescriptions on your behalf.

You will need to order your repeat prescription directly from your GP surgery every time.

Prescription medication can be ordered from your GP by:

• your GP’s online ordering service (if available through your practice), either by computer or a smartphone application
• by handing in the white, tear-off part of your repeat prescription to your surgery
• by letter

For more information you can speak to your GP practice staff or pharmacist.

What you need to do

Each time you need more medicines;

1. Order your repeat prescriptions from your GP practice when you have 7 to 10 days of medicines left
2. Contact your pharmacy to let them know you have ordered a prescription if you want them to collect it for you

Remember your GP practice may need 2-3 working days to issue a prescription and the pharmacy may need up to 2 days to dispense your medicines, so don’t leave it until the last minute.

Why is this happening?
As part of our ‘It’s our NHS and we’re not going to waste it’ engagement, the CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group) asked people to think about the way repeat prescriptions are currently provided and whether they support the idea to encourage most people to order their own repeat prescriptions directly from their doctor’s surgery by using the online ordering system or dropping a repeat prescription request in at the doctor’s surgery.

77% of people agreed with this and they also said that we needed to look at how to reduce waste in medicines.

Following this engagement, NHS Calderdale CCG has taken the decision to recommend to our member practices that they no longer accept orders from third parties after 1 April 2018.

By doing this the CCG hopes to:

• Reduce medicines wastage from orders that are not required by patients.
• Reduce spend on prescribing of unwanted medicines.
• Reduce the potential for stockpiling medicines and the associated risks.
• Reduce GP practice and community pharmacy workload in the longer term.
• Empower patients to be in control of their own medicines.
• Promote effective repeat prescribing systems including use of online ordering, Electronic Prescription Service (EPS) and repeat dispensing systems including Electronic Repeat Dispensing (ERD).

The CCG will start to roll out the changes on 1 February 2018 enabling both practices and community pharmacies and appliance contractors’ time to notify patients and put in place new protocols ahead of 1 April.