[Talk-GB] Quarterly Project (Health): Pharmacies and Defibrillators

[Mark Goodge]

On 20/05/2016 16:42, Andy Townsend wrote:
> On 20/05/2016 16:29, SK53 wrote:
>> In my experience there are certain prescription which I can only get
>> fulfilled by a hospital pharmacy (those written by a consultant).
>
> Agreed - and in the case of the one I'm familiar with it's not a stock
> issue but a bureacracy one - anything written "upstairs" by a doctor
> apparently has to be fulfilled by the (outsourced) hospital pharmacy.
> I've never tried to redeem a "regular" prescription there, but they do
> sell the normal high-street pharmacist add-ons, so they don't just rely
> on the closed shop of hospital-written prescriptions.

All pharmacists offering the standard FP10 ("green form") prescription 
service have to be able to dispense all drugs that can be prescribed via 
it. That is a licence requirement. That doesn't mean holding a stock of 
every drug - for the more esoteric ones, obtaining them to order is 
acceptable - but it is good practice to hold stocks of all those that 
are likely to be requested regularly. It's unlikely that a hospital FP10 
pharmacy would have a stock policy that's significantly more limited 
than a high street pharmacy.

However, not all hospital pharmacies are FP10. This, for example, is not:

http://www.yorkhospitals.nhs.uk/our_hospitals/_the_york_hospital/facilities/

As a rule of thumb, if the pharmacy provision is outsourced to one of 
the regular High Street names (Stewart Pharmacy and Lloyds seem to be 
the most common), then it's likely that it will offer an FP10 service. 
If it's in-house, however, or run by a hospital pharmacy specialist, 
then it probably won't.

If you were going to map them, then you would need to now the 
difference. But, personally, I don't think it is worth it. All hospitals 
have a pharmacy of some sort, so mapping them separately is pointless.

Mark