How do weekly prescriptions work

[Roseau18]

If your medication is decided by a psychiatrist who wants you to pick it up weekly from the chemist to limit the risk of overdose, do you have to go into your GP surgery every week to ask them to send a repeat prescription electronically to your designated chemist?

If not how often do you see your GP to ask for a repeat prescription?

Should you even need to see the GP if you are seeing the psychiatrist every three to four months?

It’s just the supplies that are issued every week the prescriptions themselves don’t need to be issued every week . Normally the pharmacy would get a months worth at a time and issue them weekly .id ask at GP reception for their process as your psychiatrist should contact your GP to let them know

I work in a surgery some patients have to come in weekly and collect and sign to say they have collected them. They don't order it's just generated for them and they come to collect the same day every week. Others get 4 weekly scripts sent to the chemist they are dated over the 4 weeks and the chemist gives them out the sane day every week they again don't order. It's the doctors decision which option the patient has at the surgery i work at.

The GP has had a letter. It worked for one month. Then the chemist had nothing and said to see the GP. The receptionist said she would sort it. Then this week there is nothing again and the receptionist is saying there needs to be a GP appointment but there is no appointment available for a couple of days.

It's for my daughter at uni (not me and she doesn't live at home) but it doesn't seem right to me. She has already been four days without medication and with the bank holiday that's going to be over a week. She's on two sorts of medication one of which she's been taking for three years on a monthly basis. It changed to weekly for both when she got the second medication.

My psychiatrist issues a script every three months which is then dispensed and I pick it up. If you remain under their care then the GP might not be involved in the prescribing at all.

Sleephead do es the patient order it every four weeks or does the surgery do it automatically?

Speak to the psychiatrist's secretary on Tuesday. But before then, call 111 and explain she's without medication. They can arrange for an emergency prescription.

the surgery does automatically neither system asks the patient to order it's someone at the surgery job to do it. I guess it's been missed what you could do if you think it hasn't been set up properly is have a telephone consultation with the doctor or if your surgery has a pharmacy tech speak to them. If she doesn't have meds for over the bank holiday then out of hours may be able to issue a few days supply

Thanks everyone. It confirms my impression that the GP is making things unnecessarily hard. There have been problems right from the beginning of uni with obtaining her medication and I have already been to the surgery twice with her and phoned her care co-ordinator several times as well.

I have the impression the GP thinks she doesn't really "need" the medication and that all she needs to do is to have positive thoughts...

If she is on weekly dispensing and with a psych... I really hope the GP does not believe she just needs to pull herself together 😮.
Sometimes university GP practices can be a bit more enlightened. If she is there for more than 1/2 year is it worth her registering locally. Getting medication regularly is a total ballache but I recognise that in some cases it is totally appropriate. If its just a question of collecting from a pharmacy every week there might be benefit in her seeing a local GP that has a relationship with a local pharmacy.

Mine was issued by my GP and I had to collect it daily from the chemist

If she is on weekly dispensing and with a psych... I really hope the GP does not believe she just needs to pull herself together.

As you say you would hope that since my daughter was under CAMHS until she started university (and at one point was an in-patient), is now under CPA (not standard care), has a psychiatrist and weekly dispensing that the GP would recognise she has serious problems. However, the GP has told her that if she didn't have negative thoughts she wouldn't be depressed, that she is young and pretty and has no reason to have mental health problems, that someone needs to tell her the truth about things because none of the mental health professionals are, and that she has already had a lot of therapy so she shouldn't say she needs more...

This is a GP local to the university - but perhaps this is part of the problem as the GP didn't know my daughter before she started university but the GP should still trust the judgement of the mental health care professionals.

The GP sounds absolutely awful. Time for a new one. Almost as bad as the one I had when I was on the verge of being admitted with hideous PND who told me to consider having more sex as a solution. The. Mind. Boggles.

My dd had a weekly prescription at one point but she only went monthly to the gp (they insisted on monthly visits to ensure she was ok) they switched to monthly at my request because she lived at home (university student) and didn't get free prescriptions, I didn't want to pay 4x as much! Think it's common for university practices because they have a different demographic