[Question] the UK — has anyone got a straight answer on private prescription
the UK — has anyone got a straight answer on private prescription. If this has been answered properly somewhere, link me and I will delete.
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.
The scheme cap in Ireland was the single most useful thing I learned in a year of reading this board.
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.
That is everything I have. The rest is opinion and I have tried to keep it out.
best — the order this archive was captured in
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.
the Irish scheme cap is the single most useful fact in this board
Left up. It names a nation and an ICB, which is all we ask of a pathway post.
That is the first-month offer price, not the ongoing monthly cost. The tracker records the second one.
Correction: that threshold is your ICB’s, not a national one. They differ and they change by year.
Discharged at goal back to the GP, who would not continue it. Nobody had mentioned that this was how it ends.
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ask the pharmacy for the price list, not the headline offer
Disagree. That is the pathway in one ICB and it does not generalise even to the next one over.
Read the MHRA notice rather than the news coverage and the actual scope was much narrower than the panic threads suggested.
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.
A private prescription is an independent route: it does not affect NHS list position, and it is not a step in the same pathway.
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.
Switched pharmacies mid-titration and had to restart the ladder because the concentrations did not line up.
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.
an online consultation that asks you nothing is not a consultation
Concentrations can differ between products and between pharmacies. Switching mid-titration means redoing the arithmetic rather than carrying the old unit count across.
Four pharmacies, four prices, same product, same month. The spread was larger than I expected and none of them were the headline offer.
This. The monthly pricing tracker is the most useful thing on this board and it works because nobody is allowed to link anything.
I would not read a supply notice as a shortage in your pharmacy tomorrow. They are not the same thing.
England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are four different pathways
Agreed. The ICB variation is the thing that makes national advice useless here.
Push back: a private prescription is a separate route, not a shortcut through the NHS queue.
That is Scotland’s arrangement and the post is asking about England.
Not convinced — the US threads are a different system entirely and importing their advice here does real harm.
Is this a discharge back to the GP, or a discontinuation?
the ICB decides the threshold and they are not the same across England
the price difference between pharmacies this month is genuinely large
Is this a discharge back to the GP, or a discontinuation?
This is why national advice does not work here. It is commissioned locally and it varies.
- 1In England, specialist weight management services are commissioned locally,…9 comments in this branch · started by u/diego_almeida
- 2Pharmacy pricing on a private prescription is set by the pharmacy. The…8 comments in this branch · started by u/nordic_pricing