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A private prescription alongside NHS care

Started 4 August 2024 · 12 replies · 148 hearts · read 3.1k times

MorayElgin, UK · 4 August 2024
2 years ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: A private prescription alongside NHS care

Anyone else here in my part of the world? I would like to compare notes.

I am the only person I know doing this within a considerable distance, so this circle is genuinely my whole peer group on it.

I have read the guides and they are good, and they are necessarily general, and my question is entirely about local specifics.

The pathway where I am appears to be different from every account I have read, and I would like to know whether that is the area or me.

Thanks. Local experience especially welcome — I have plenty of advice from elsewhere and none of it applies.

49

HettieLancaster, UK
#1

My review is annual and the bloods are done at the practice, and the whole arrangement takes about ninety minutes of my year.

12

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#2

I want to slow this down. Two people are describing two different systems and the advice from one will not transfer to the other.

17

NevGrimsby, UK
#3

I moved between areas and had to start most of the process again, which nobody warned me about and which cost me four months.

14me too 5

MableBolton, UK
#4

Nev, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The HSE and NHS pathways are not the same and I have watched people in this circle get quite confused reading each other's experience.

6

Gwen DAberystwyth, UK
#5

Building on what Mable wrote rather than answering the original question.

Something worth knowing: my prescription charges worked out differently once I looked into the annual arrangement properly.

11

TedIpswich, UK
#6

My practice has a nurse-led clinic that handles all of this and it is far more thorough than any GP appointment I have had.

10

BassCoventry, UK
#7

What I would say is that the local specifics matter enormously and general advice about the system is usually wrong for your particular area.

15

JunoBrighton, UK
#8

Grateful you posted rather than kept it to yourself.

8me too 1

TildaCambridge, UK
#9

Gently disagreeing with Juno, or rather adding the other half of it.

The dietitian appointment I was offered and turned down twice turned out to be the most useful part of the whole pathway.

8me too 2

MarnieAyr, UK
#10

I asked to be told the specific criterion I was being assessed against and it made the whole thing much more navigable.

12

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#11

Speaking as a facilitator: telephone and video reviews have come up in every regional thread this year and are still not offered unprompted in most places.

27

NemoneLewes, UK
#12

Marnie has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

Something practical: everything goes through the online system at my practice now and it is far more reliable than the phone ever was.

8