Pharmacist reviewed my prescription?

[adultcat]

I live in a smallish village - the kind where everyone know each other (or thinks they do!). I serve my doctor and pharmacist where I work so am familiar with them.
Today, I went to collect my repeat prescription and was asked if I had five minutes to spare for the pharmacist to speak to me. We went off in the side room and he logged on to the computer. He then asked me if I was happy with my medication / any side effects. Asked me if I am happy with my contraception and what alternatives there were as I've stopped taking the mini pill as I wasn't getting on with it - he wanted to know why...!
The whole 'chat' felt really uncomfortable, possibly because I serve him as a customer but I was wondering if this is a done thing now? I thought it would be my doctors place to review my medication and check everything is ok?
Has anyone else had this done??

This is a revenue raising exercise because pharmacies are paid for the reviews by the NHS. I always refuse.

They get paid for it. You can refuse. The quality of pharmacists varies wildly. They can be a really useful source of help and information or they can be useless. A bit like doctors really...

I am with the OP on this. The fact that he started asking her about contraception after he had taken her into a private area really rings alarm bells for me.

The OP said she had stopped taking her birth control medication. That could mean she has had a reaction to it, or alternatively, it could mean that she is trying to conceive. It would be worth checking that none of the other medication she is taking is counter indicated during pregnancy.

My surgery employs a pharmacist to carry out reviews.
I found her very helpful and she sorted out my repeat list (which was a complete muddle due to my consultant constantly changing my meds).
And she took the time to listen and give advice regarding side effects as well as coping with a pretty horrible, progressive condition.
I think it is a good service for people with chronic conditions who take lots of meds. GPs really don't have the time to go through it all so thoroughly.
She has nothing to do with dispensing or any of the local pharmacies.

I've had to stop using the chemists near my home. Years ago when my marriage was breaking down, I didn't take all of my medication that had been dispensed for me, I was in the middle of having a nervous breakdown, after I left my home & then husband, my ex sil took the unused medication back to the chemists who contacted my GP surgery who them threw me off their books, leaving me at a very vulnerable time with no GP. On the recent occasions I have had to get my prescription dispensed, the pharmacist has been quite nasty towards me, I recently was prescribed an antibiotic that was very hard to get hold of & I had to contact my GP to get it changed to something that was available, when I went to collect it, he interrogated me about why I had needed antibiotics on 4 occasions in the last 2 months, I'd had a very recurrent uti that wouldn't clear up & suggested that I hadn't been taking the previous courses & that was why my infection hadn't cleared up. I had completed every course each time. I had recently got a copy of my medical records to help complete a claim for disability benefits & on the front page in red it is marked THIS PATIENT IS NON COMPLIANT WITH MEDICATION, USE CAUTION WHEN PRESCRIBING. The time I wasn't taking my medication was nearly 10 years ago, I was suffering severe mental health problems after escaping a violent marriage where I had been raped by my then husband & had PTSD, I was barely functioning, will this follow me around for the rest of my life?

yes and its a phenominal safety net, my Mum was on several medications, the Pharmacist’s review spotted that two of the medications were wiping out the benefits of another medication she took.

Great Service.

Chemists are great my mil was on a number of different meds that were actually counteracting each other and had the potential to make her quite Ill!! They know the drugs ins and outs doc's are best at diagnosis (however would use chemist as first port of call)

I can’t find the comment about losing respect for a pharmacist because they told the poster they are also a homepath.

What a bizarre reaction. As far as I’m aware it is only this country in Europe, which has such an aversion to quality homeopathy especially when prescribed by trained professionals. I assume it is the English language effect from America, which has driven this. We are a great market for American central big pharmaceutical companies.

So to this poster. It is totally normal to be prescribed homeopathic medicine by the GP in places other than your back yard. Especially by a pharmacist, who has by far more knowledge on the medicinal benefits of certain compounds than a doctor let alone a member of the public.

Nat6999
That sounds awful. I’d contact your GP surgery in the first instance about ways to have this removed.

Nat6999 you can write to your GP requesting to have that removed from your records. If you include the explanation you've written here it should be straight forward.

I've had a couple of these.

I'm reasonably intelligent, I can read and used to be a clinical physiologist.

It's still useful because I'm on a cocktail of meds and some should not be taken together, some with food, some without and I do forget which is which over time.

Those who have never had it, well if you only fill a prescription for antibiotics every couple of years you won't have a review.

As a GP I think it's an excellent service. Our local pharmacist are all knowledgeable and sensible, yes of course it can vary but you get 'bad eggs' in every profession.
They can take extra time if a patient has higher needs and they have more knowledge about the best ways / times to take meds etc. Also acts as an additional safety net for mistakes which can't be a bad thing. Also patients are told a lot of information in a GP appt sometimes and can't always retain it all so it can be useful to recap what they're taking and why.
Pharmacists are definitely not all failed doctors
My only niggles are that the reviews aren't usually communicated to GPs (though we have a local project starting to change this) so workload is duplicated and we sometimes get messages from patients which are a little lost in translation.

Pharmacists have to check. They are the ones who get prosecuted if it is wrong, not the doctor.

Its normal and an effective use if the NHS. Especially as pharmacists have much more knowledge on medication interactions

I know someone who the pharmacist reviewed when looking at the prescription issues as the person would have not been able to function with the different types of medication prescribed. This was fed back to the GP and the prescription was completely changed

Pharmacists are a really useful resource. My mum is on a cocktail of drugs from different specialists and it is the pharmacist that often checks for interactions between them, side effects etc

I haven’t been on many drugs but it was a pharmacist that spotted I was allergic to the malaria tablets my gp prescribed and not the GP.

This is a very good thing. Pharmacist caught a clash in medications prescribed for my grandmother. Multiple consultants (various ailments) and no one but pharmacist checked this aspect. Could’ve been quite serious problem.

So to this poster. It is totally normal to be prescribed homeopathic medicine by the GP in places other than your back yard. Especially by a pharmacist, who has by far more knowledge on the medicinal benefits of certain compounds than a doctor let alone a member of the public.

Homeopathic medicines are distilled water, or sugar. They are not “certain compounds”. They are water or sugar. If GPS or pharmacists prescribe them they are charlatans.

That is why pharmacists who work for places that sell water as medicine cannot be taken seriously. If they double down by claiming water is a medicine they should be struck off.

Nat6699, write to the practice manager and state that there’s an error in your notes that needs removing as it’s causing you problems, and threaten then with the ICO if they refuse. They’ll have no evidence for the assertion, from what you are saying. For all they know the drugs you didn’t take ten years ago might not have agreed with you. It sounds like they haven’t bothered to ask.,

Mummy, people don’t give homeopathy the time of day any longer since extensive clinical trials failed to show it had any impact whatsoever. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fraud.

So to this poster. It is totally normal to be prescribed homeopathic medicine by the GP in places other than your back yard. Especially by a pharmacist, who has by far more knowledge on the medicinal benefits of certain compounds than a doctor let alone a member of the public.

Surely if a more natural remedy will work, then that is better than a chemical drug? My pharmacist was able to suggest a particular vitamin was probably lacking due to me getting mouth ulcers all of the time, and it did fix the situation. Much better than the GP (who weren't able to give me any answers).

To those commenting that pharmacists get paid for this service by the NHS and implying that somehow they are profiteering by doing reviews do you have any idea how GPs make money? They don’t do their job for free. They too are paid for their services by the NHS
I am a pharmacist and work in a GP practice by the way.

Magenta46 unless you are your dads designated carer and have full knowledge of his medical conditions which the Pharmacist either knew about or asked you before discussing his medication, informing you that your dad is on BP meds and has gout is a serious breach of medical confidentiality, my DH picks up my prescriptions mainly because where I work is a 20 min walk to the high street and in a different town to my GP, DH works in the town where we live and can easily pick up my prescription from our GP and the Pharmacy is next door to where he works so it makes more sense its no different from him picking up a loaf of bread or a pint of milk because he is near the shops.

He does know what medical conditions I have - underactive thyroid, dodgy bladder and arthritis, but the Pharmacist has no way of knowing that and has no right to assume I have shared my medical information with DH, so if DH was taken into a room and was given info about my dodgy bladder without my consent or knowledge then I would be making a serious complaint.

Surely if we to treat Pharmacists as medical professionals we should expect them to act as medical professionals and that should include the right to expect that our medical conditions and medications would be treated as confidential and only shared between people who are involved in our care or who we have agreed should also have the information.

The Pharmacist may have been helpful in your case, but I find it very worrying that information could be given to anyone who picks up someone meds without basic checks being done, perhaps any Pharmacists on here can throw some light on the procedure

I had one of these. Without any explanation as I was being passed my pills by the counter staff the pharmacist intercepted them and over the counter in front of several other customers stood waiting for these proceeded to ask me how long I’d been on them for, about the condition (she didn’t know what it was!) and opened up the packet to look at the boxes to see what I was taking. They were then handed to me and I was asked to sign a form... I later found out this meant they got a payment for my “medicine review”. This was awhile ago. I did complain directly to the woman but I never went back.

Surely if a more natural remedy will work, then that is better than a chemical drug?

(A) homeopaths believe water, pure water, is a drug. Homeopathic “remedies” are a very expensive (and profitable, hence why charlatan pharmacists like them) way to buy Evian. You can get water in big bottles free with the daily telegraph at Smiths.

(B) could you explain how “natural” drugs work if they do not contain “chemicals”? What do they contain? The vital force and some luminiferous aether?