[NHS] two years and four months on a tier 3 waiting list. timeline inside.
England. Full timeline, dates approximate to the month for obvious reasons.
- Month 0 — GP referral to specialist weight management. BMI comfortably over threshold, two qualifying comorbidities.
- Month 4 — letter confirming referral received. No date.
- Month 11 — chased. Told the list was around 18 months.
- Month 19 — chased again. Told the list was around 18 months.
- Month 24 — first appointment. Dietetics, no pharmacotherapy discussion.
- Month 28 — second appointment, prescription initiated.
Two years four months from referral to first dose. I am posting it because when I started, every timeline I could find online was American and every UK answer was "ask your GP".
best — the order this archive was captured in
This is the most useful UK post on the site and I want to add the parallel timeline, because the comparison is the actual decision most people are making.
Private route: online consultation same week, prescription within days, roughly £129–£189 a month depending on pharmacy and month. Four pharmacies I track have moved price twice this year, both upward.
So the honest framing is: 28 months and free, or one week and £150 a month indefinitely. Neither is a good answer and pretending either is straightforward does people a disservice.
and the thing nobody warns you about is that the private route is not a bridge to the NHS one. going private did not move me up the list, and coming off private while waiting meant regaining.
different country but the Drugs Payment Scheme cap is the most useful single thing i learned in three years, and no clinician mentioned it to me once.
this is the recurring theme across every country thread: the cost-reduction mechanism exists, it is not advertised, and you find it on a forum.
NL basisverzekering will not cover it at all, so the mechanism here is "there is no mechanism", which at least has the virtue of clarity.
norway is the outlier and not in a good way. same product, roughly 2.4x the cheapest EU price i track.
Excellent post. Reminder for the thread: say which nation. England, Scotland, Wales and NI have genuinely different pathways and the confident replies here are often about a different system entirely.
as an American reading this: four denials and three appeals took me eleven months. the systems fail differently and they both fail.
eleven months of active fighting versus twenty-eight months of passive waiting. i genuinely do not know which i would choose.
the structural similarity is that both systems ration by friction rather than by rule, and friction is invisible in the published criteria.
just go private, it is not that expensive
£150 a month indefinitely is not expensive to you. the post is a timeline, not a request for a solution.
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