The NHS cut down on prescriptions deemed to have low clinical value

Who the hell is getting suncream prescribed from a doctor?

That is the interesting thing - if people are working the system to get stuff like this free then that is one thing, if say someone is say on a prescribed course of treatment like above which as a side effect makes them more susceptible to the effects of the sun then that is another entirely.
 
Absolutely cut down on the things that are more easily and cheaply available without a prescription, but that's only dealing with part of the problem. The main part is dealing with a system that allowed this to happen in the first place, and ensuring that it is kept under regular review and policed effectively.
 
Some of the amounts listed are eye-watering. I can understand prescriptions for specialist treatment courses and the like, but it seems some just see it as a way to get something for nothing..

I wonder how many GP appointments are taken up by people trying to get something easily acquired elsewhere over the counter.
 
I suspect some of the stuff deemed unnecessary for prescription are only offered because:

-It use to be only easily available through prescription
-Ignorant know-it-all patients huff and puff until they get it and so create demand
-decision makers offer lucrative contracts to companies for some political/monetary personal advancement
 
How does that work out if they pay for prescriptions? I can understand unemployed people having an incentive to milk the system but why pay £8.40 for a prescription for bread if he/she could just buy it in the supermarket? It isn't *that* expensive. Unless a single prescription covers several months supply or something?

Scotland - we don't pay for prescriptions - so they get it free.
 
-Ignorant know-it-all patients huff and puff until they get it and so create demand

I'd suspect it is mostly that and weak GPs

same reason they keep dishing out antibiotics so frequently even when they should know better, probably easier for them to write the prescription and send away the demanding mother and child than have to argue with them
 
I cant help but feel that some GPs do it so that these know-it-all's dont end up re-booking for a moan and wasting more time. Stupid as it has created a culture where we seem to fawn over the paranoid ramblings of people who regularly read a nutritionist's medical advice which they post on a Facebook page or blog they go to.
 
good imo, the country needs a debate.

this is going to massively snowball in the coming decades.
either we need to massively increase funding, or we have to decrease what the nhs does.

in an ideal world we would increase funding, however i have no faith that in the uk, that it would be used wisely.
so i would like a two tier system where emergency care is always given and cost effective long term treatment is given, then insurance and private for the much more costly and far less effective treatments. NHS already does this to a degree but a lot of doctors also break it for terminal patients as they find it hard to tell them the truth and would rather give them hope even though it essentially doesn't exist. Which isnt just a waste of money, imo leads to massive suffering of what can be years. Certainly both my granddads I felt should have been more honest and should have stopped treatment well before they finally died.

and in general can we have significant and enforced deterrents for Gps handing out antibiotics for a simpler life and other such issues.

oh and can we move to a pro active NHS rather than reactive, as its been shown to not only improve peoples life but costs less.
 
My wife suffers from Coeliac disease and to be honest, the few times we've had the prescription stuff (to try it) it's been downright terrible anyway.

Yes, gluten free food in supermarkets and other shops cost more than "regular" counterparts (not least due to the idiotic fad surrounding going "gluten free", trust me, if she could, she'd eat gluten), but the Genuis/Warburtons/Schar etc brands taste 100% better than the junk you get on prescription.

Should have been ditched years ago, sure there might have been call for it 5-10 years ago, when gluten free product choice was both rare and limited, but recently things have been vastly improved (the one upside to the "healthkick fad").
 
As I said in a post on page one. As I take immunosuppressants I have an increased chance of cancer, including one of the most common ones, skin cancer.
I am supposed to wear factor 40+ all year around on any exposed skin and because of this it was prescribed to me as you can probably imagine I get trough a fair amount.
My local authority removed it from their lists a couple of years ago and I've bought it ever since. However there will be people out there in a similar situation to myself who are earning a lot less than me and will find the cost associated high.
Don't start spitting your feathers over any of this - there are plenty of genuine cases for all of the "potential to remove" treatments. If however the NHS decided to actually stop those people who don't need things and to stop GP's from prescribing anything and everything, there would be far greater savings to be had.
 
Should result result in a % drop in people booking in to see the docs for some free paracetamol etc

When put that way Stoofa I can see why it is given out as part of a combination of treatment.
 
Costs are climbing and we need to trim the fat.

"trim the fat" almost always means "be as nasty to lower status people as it is possible to get away with". It's not a promising phrase. People at a decision-making level very rarely regard themselves as a waste of resources, i.e. "fat" in this context. That's for people with lower status, who won't be known to people at a decision-making level and will be doing work that people at a decision-making level probably have no real understanding of and thus can't accurately evaluate. It's a problem in almost all large organisations.

The issue of stuff that's useful and relevant but which the NHS is being hugely over-charged for should be seen as evidence of a much more serious problem - procurement. It shouldn't be happening at all, let alone on the scale of hundreds of millions of pounds per year. And no, the solution isn't to pay a lot of money to hire procurement consultants to change nothing relevant.

Making every patient buy it retail is simple, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the best solution. There needs to be a lot of medical consideration from people with enough knowledge to understand, e.g. replacing a drug with a cheaper one is an apparent saving, but if it results in a higher rate of medical problems requiring other treatment it might be far more expensive overall.
 
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