the pricing thing finally clicked for me and I want to write it down
the pricing thing finally clicked for me and I want to write it down. Not a hot take, just something I have not seen said plainly here.
A private prescription is an independent route: it does not affect NHS list position, and it is not a step in the same pathway.
Why the monthly pricing tracker works, and the rule that makes it work.
Members post the pharmacy, the product, the month and the price they actually paid — not an advertised offer, not a first-month discount. No links of any kind are permitted, which removes the entire incentive to post anything other than what happened.
The result is that the spread between pharmacies in a given month is visible, and it is consistently larger than people expect. That single table has saved members here more money than every other thread on the board combined, and it survives only because the no-links rule is enforced without exception.
Discharge at goal, which nobody warns people about.
Specialist services in England are commissioned to deliver a defined intervention. Reaching goal is a successful outcome and it typically ends with discharge back to primary care. Whether prescribing continues after that is a local decision that varies, and plenty of members here have discovered it at the point of discharge rather than at the start.
The useful thing to do is ask early: what happens when I finish, and does prescribing continue in primary care in this area. Ask it in writing, keep the answer, and you will at least know which conversation you are heading for.
Sceptical readings welcome. The confident ones are the ones I distrust.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Pharmacy staff name removed. The pharmacy itself can be named in a pricing post.
specialist service, not GP, for tier 3 in most of England
Have you seen the current threshold published by your ICB?
In England, specialist weight management services are commissioned locally, so eligibility criteria and waiting times differ by ICB. There is no single national threshold to quote.
How long have you been on the list, and from what date?
Same. My ICB threshold was different from the neighbouring one and nobody could tell me why.
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the price difference between pharmacies this month is genuinely large
Small fix — that is the Scottish pathway. The post is asking about England and the answer is different.
ask the pharmacy for the price list, not the headline offer
an online consultation that asks you nothing is not a consultation
Right, and reading the actual supply notice rather than the coverage of it saves a fortnight of speculation.
Correcting myself: the referral was 5 months ago, not the figure I gave. I keep rounding it down.
discharge at goal back to the GP is where a lot of people fall over
Which pharmacy, and what did they quote for the month rather than the first month?
Agreed. The ICB variation is the thing that makes national advice useless here.
the Irish scheme cap is the single most useful fact in this board
Correction: that threshold is your ICB’s, not a national one. They differ and they change by year.
Four pharmacies, four prices, same product, same month. The spread was larger than I expected and none of them were the headline offer.
Four pharmacies, four prices, same product, same month.
Agreed — and keeping the letters with dates is what makes any later challenge possible.
Agreed on keeping letters. Dates are what make an appeal or a re-referral possible.
Which nation, and which ICB if you are in England?
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own arrangements. An answer that begins with "in England" should say so, and most of the confusion here comes from answers that do not.
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own arrangements.
omar_eriksen is right that the two routes are separate. A private prescription does not move you up the list.
The two routes, described separately, because mixing them is where most of the confusion here starts.
The NHS route in England runs through specialist weight management services commissioned by your ICB. Criteria, waiting times and what happens at discharge are all local decisions, which is why a confident answer from somebody in a different area may be wrong for you.
The private route is an independent transaction: a consultation, a prescription and a pharmacy price. It does not affect your position on any NHS list and it is not a shortcut through one. Both are legitimate; they are simply not the same pathway and they do not connect.
NHS pathway or private prescription?
Supply notices from the regulator describe expected availability at a national level. They do not predict what any individual pharmacy has on the shelf next week.