Guidelines : Repeat Prescription Management

Duplicate prescribing of inhalers that contain the same medicine is a commonly reported medicines safety incident when a patient’s inhalers are changed.  The “Know your inhalers” diagram shows practice staff the class of medicine in commonly prescribed inhalers and will help to identify if there is potential for a duplicate inhaler prescribing error.

A Practice Prescribing Policy will help make sure that all prescribers practise safe prescribing. All Practices will have slightly different processes and mix of staff; therefore it is important that the practice prescribing policy accurately reflects your own processes.

Guidance for writing a practice prescribig policy has been developed for practices to use as an aid to ensure all appropriate sections are included within their own policy. This guidance should be locally adapted to reflect your own processes and used in combination with the Repeat Prescription Management Guidance.

Both resources are available on this page

Repeat prescribing has been defined as “a partnership between patient and prescriber that allows the prescriber to authorise a prescription so it can be repeatedly issued at agreed intervals, without the patient having to consult the prescriber at each issue”. This document ("Repeat Prescription Management Guidance" below) describes 
the different ways repeat prescriptions are generated as well as including a list of  standards  to help review your practice repeat prescribing process.

Unplanned changes to normal patterns of prescribing, e.g. over-ordering of medicines by patients, puts the medicines supply chain under pressure and can result in medicines stock shortages. This increases work for GPs, practice staff, community pharmacies and inconveniences patients.

The Surrey Heartlands Medicines Management Team have produced a few reminders, including specific advice about inhalers,  and good practice tips for practices - see documents below.

Additional guidance has been developed to support the management of medicine stock-shortages and can be found here: https://surreyccg.res-systems.net/PAD/Guidelines/Detail/6082