- This topic has 6 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 7 years ago by
.
- Topic
I assume there are loads of others on this forum who have to take prescription medicines on a regular basis.
For those that have never heard of Patient Access, it is an electronic online service for making appointments with your clinic or doctor, reading your health history (where available) and most important to me, ordering repeat prescription.
I take a little assortment myself because I had a stroke and now take these prescriptions to control blood pressure amongst other things that prevent me turning into a vegetable.
I just wanted to know how folk who use this service (Patient Access) are getting on with it, good or bad, not so much the arranging of appointments (haven’t tried that yet)with your clinic or doctor but the process of asking for one of your prescription electronically, through to collecting said prescription at a chemist.
https://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/online-services/Pages/gp-services-choice-1.aspx
- Replies
It’s been brilliant, though adding new medicine can be a problem when multiple Doctors are involved, also they updated the website recently and logging into the new portal involved telephoning our Surgery to regain permissions. Again that was probably unique to our GP’s Practice.
Hi wmcforum
The bit between my PC and the doctors surgery seems to work well for us but we (wife as well has her meds) were sold the ideal of being able to change chemist on each and every prescription.
We only started just over a month ago so the orders were putting through now are truly repeats prescriptions using this system as before that it was ask doctor for prescription then go to clinic and collect a piece of paper, take to a chemist of choice then collect meds the next day.
We changed the chemist from our normal on the first order using the online order form because we are sick and tired of the high priority service given to the Methadone gangs, of course the pharmacist only wants to get the foul mouth time wasters out of the chemist as fast as they can but we want to get away as fast as we can too.
Anyway we changed to a chemist in the same group but about a mile away but no junkies, prescription goes in electronically and flags the next day as approved, we wait 2 or 3 days, we go to the chemist and they said “the order has only just that second come in, we will make it up now” so we stand around for 10 minutes.
Because of the “only just came in BS” we decided to select an independent chemist and see if the service improved there so last week I open my account and the tab to select a “chemist of your choice” has gone so this can’t be changed no more. The support for the system is about as useful as a chocolate teapot and they could not even understand my complaint that they took down the option to select a chemist with no explanation on where your supposed to collect your meds as that option to choose has gone. There answer was to contact your clinic.
Turns out they have a technical problem with the chemist of your choice menu so took it down.
My wife put an order in using PA last Thursday week but the local Methadone chemist made up the prescription that they took from our clinic even though they are not our chosen chemist any more and when we went in yesterday, one week to the day guess what, “your order has only just come through and the pharmacist has gone to lunch” even though we know for fact they collected the order from our clinic without our permission a week earlier. Today while my wife is waiting for the prescription to be made up (yes, still not made up) a guy comes in with a paper prescription and the chemist said “do you want to wait, it will be a couple of minutes” but seems to me if its electronic it will be about a week.
We have decide this is just a joke so now we are still going to use PA to order the prescription but collect the pieces of paper from our clinic and go to a local supermarket where they do your meds there and then or while you shop. Of course we can only do that if the clinic allows it but if they don’t I’m afraid its back the twentieth century way of doing things.
Sorry to hear it’s not working for you Chris,
The wife and I have been using it for sometime, it only recently changed to patient access for us, was called something else before that.
For repeats we collect our meds from the dispensary in the surgery and as we have regular appointments at the surgery we time it so we can collect when going for an appointment and had no issues.
Also like that we can see test results before the surgery contacts us with them, and all the other medical information we can see.
Making appointments is also good as cancelled appointments show and if you are vigilant you can get an appointment sometimes within a few hours, if not the next day.
It is not perfect, i would like to see the function of being able to send messages to the surgery and for them to reply back – this may be possible for some – depends on the surgery and if they want this feature activated.
But is is a thumbs up for us.
I think the problems were having is stemming from the fact the people who run the system on behalf of the NHS have taken down, sometime the past 3 weeks, the ability to change the nominated chemist and I add without any explanation what-so ever other than, we had problems with it so what you do now is up to you. Talk about being left up a creak without a paddle. If you haven’t change your chemist then I would assume you would not notice that anything has changed.
We only joined just over a month ago and only change the chemist once from the methadone Boots the Chemist to a large Boots on a shopping complex but were not too impressed with the way Boots are operating so want to change.
We will have to go to our local surgery now to change this but sort of defeats the who ideal of reducing loads on the doctors surgeries.
The tab for nominating the collection chemist is back on my order form so hopefully everything will be as smooth as a Galaxy chocolate bar from now on.
They had an IT problem with it and now has been sorted but their communications skills as to what’s going on leaves a lot to be desired.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.