Date
Pharmacy
Pharmacy address
Dear Sir/Madam
IMPORTANTRE:repeat medication for patients in NHS Ipswich and East Suffolk Clinical Commissioning Group (IESCCG)
NHS Ipswich and East Suffolk CCG have three medicines management objectives. They relate to safety, quality and cost-effectiveness.
In Ipswich and east Suffolkwe estimate that there is £2.4 million worth of waste generated on unused or unneeded medication. You will be aware that the NHS is constantly looking for ways to ensure that money is spent exactly where it is needed at the time it is needed. We have asked for help from patients and partners as a result.
We are continuously looking at new ways to achieve these objectives. The CCG is now planning to pilot a scheme, based on experience from NHS Luton CCG. This pilot means practices do not accept repeat orders from pharmacies or other third party organisations;patients must order directly with the practice.They will be supported to order only what they need and ask questions about their prescriptions in the practice.
By working with patients through practices, Luton CCG has seen a reduction of prescribed items by 53,675 at the end of November 2015 - a reduction of 2.50%. Comparatively we have seen a rise of 103,688 items - an increase of 2.03% - in the same time period.
Not all practices will be involved. As each of the participating practices start to adopt this pilot, it will affect your pharmacy. We will inform you when each participating practice plans to implement this scheme.For one or two practices, this may be as early as 1March 2016.
A review of the scheme will be held in autumn when we will invite patients’, pharmacies’ and practices’ views and experiences of the pilot. It will include an audit to see if this pilot has an impact on items prescribed.
Pharmacies will be able to collect prescriptions from practices and deliver to patients as before.The only change will be around re-ordering. We recognise that there will be some patients who will not be able to re-order for themselves so we have asked our participating practices to follow a Standard Operating Procedure and identify any patients that will need extra assistance in the re-ordering of their medication. For these patients, each individual practice will have to implement a specific process for the re-ordering of this group;a request may be made to continue ordering for certain individuals. If you have any concern about an individual patient where you feel they may need assistance, please do not hesitate to contact the practice.
Please note pharmacies can continue to re-order on behalf of patients in any of the other practices throughout the Ipswich and East Suffolk CCGregion that do not take part in this pilot.
Yours faithfully
Catherine Butler Maddie Baker-Woods
Head of GP PrescribingChief Operating Officer