[Meta] the private prescription rule is doing its job and people should stop complaining
the private prescription rule is doing its job and people should stop complaining — posting the reasoning in public because a policy you cannot inspect is just a preference.
Pharmacy pricing on a private prescription is set by the pharmacy. The spread between them in a given month is routinely substantial, which is why a tracker built from member reports is more useful than any headline.
Two years and four months on a tier 3 list. Referral date and every letter kept, which turned out to matter when the service reorganised.
Concentrations can differ between products and between pharmacies. Switching mid-titration means redoing the arithmetic rather than carrying the old unit count across.
Happy to answer the boring questions. Those are usually the ones worth asking.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Discharge from a specialist service at goal is a normal end point of that pathway. Whether prescribing continues in primary care afterwards is a local decision and is worth asking about at the start rather than at the end.
Four pharmacies, four prices, same product, same month. The spread was larger than I expected and none of them were the headline offer.
GP said no in the spring, specialist said yes eighteen months later. Same person, same numbers.
This. The monthly pricing tracker is the most useful thing on this board and it works because nobody is allowed to link anything.
Referral link removed and the post left up. No links of any kind here, and that rule is not negotiable.
Referral link removed and the post left up.
Adding the practical bit — ask what happens at discharge before you start, not after.
The online consultation asked me three questions, none of them about my history. I did not go ahead.
Right, and reading the actual supply notice rather than the coverage of it saves a fortnight of speculation.
Right, and reading the actual supply notice rather than the coverage of it saves a fortnight of speculation.
Agreed — and keeping the letters with dates is what makes any later challenge possible.
tier 3 waiting lists are measured in years, not months
Discharged at goal back to the GP, who would not continue it. Nobody had mentioned that this was how it ends.
Discharged at goal back to the GP, who would not continue it.
This is why national advice does not work here. It is commissioned locally and it varies.
private prescription pricing moves monthly and the pharmacy is most of the spread
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.
A private prescription is an independent route: it does not affect NHS list position, and it is not a step in the same pathway.
The scheme cap in Ireland was the single most useful thing I learned in a year of reading this board.
Push back: a private prescription is a separate route, not a shortcut through the NHS queue.
an online consultation that asks you nothing is not a consultation
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.
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.
discharge at goal back to the GP is where a lot of people fall over
Why the monthly pricing tracker works, and the rule that makes it work.
lane_watcher is right that the two routes are separate. A private prescription does not move you up the list.
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
- 1Discharge from a specialist service at goal is a normal end point of that…13 comments in this branch · started by u/vikram_mbeki
- 2Why the monthly pricing tracker works, and the rule that makes it work.…6 comments in this branch · started by u/lane_watcher