Featured In: The Coalville Times, Friday, June 11, 2021

HEALTH MATTERS WITH DR HANNA ROBBINS

OVER the next few weeks we’ll be sharing some insights into what happens behind the scenes at your GP Surgery. This week our Medication Team outlines their role at the surgery:

The Medication Team supports the clinical team of doctors and nurses and we are the first point of contact for you and for pharmacies with any medication query. We are responsible for processing all of your routine prescription requests. These come from our online prescription service and we get some prescription requests on paper.

The Medication Team processes clinic letters from hospital and other clinics, making changes to medications and drug doses, adding new medications, and stopping others.

Sometimes we need to get more information from the hospital team about new drugs and why they have been recommended. Some medications carry a higher risk of side ef- fects and need regular monitoring with blood tests the hospital team take overall responsibility for this medication and this is called a ‘Shared Care Agreement’. These are two reasons why there is sometimes a delay in issuing your prescription.

We make sure that any routine monitoring appointments are booked at the right time so that our prescribing is safe. Some of these checks were paused last year, but are now running again, and we will be contacting you by telephone, text message or letter over the coming months if yours is due.

It’s worth register- ing for online prescriptions it makes it much simpler for you to put in a medication request. If you’re not yet registered then your GP Surgery website has more information; depending on how your Surgery runs this, you may need to give them a call to get it set up (phoning in the afternoon is better as the phone lines are busy in the mornings).