That is weekends and bank holidays for you. There is a huge surge of late late show (repeat) prescriptions on a Friday afternoon/evening and Monday morning and especially Monday evening every week. It's getting worse imho.
The reality of working for the cash-strapped NHS
- Thread starter KnackeredBike
- Start date
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That is weekends and bank holidays for you. There is a huge surge of late late show (repeat) prescriptions on a Friday afternoon/evening and Monday morning and especially Monday evening every week. It's getting worse imho.
classic33
Leg End Member
I can't ask for a repeat prescription more than two days before they think it's due(I can ask, I'll not get), and all months have only 28 days.
Guess what day of the week the next one is due on.
Happens all the time at the hard ass surgeries. Usually rushed through on a Friday morning. Or maybe a Friday night or even Saturday morning. It's their call, it they want to do it that way its up to them. There are surgeries that are very liberal about it all.
all down to local service providers.
my 3 repeat scrips are each for 3 months.
I can drop off repeat request from scrip form.
I can apply to GP online.
I can email GP
I can apply on line to the pharmacy in the GP surgery who will do everything and text me when it is ready to collect.
Whichever I use always works seamlessly.
don't blame the NHS . blame your GP.
Pro Tour Punditry
Guru
Before you all get carried away with "cash-strappedness" I should point out that there are salary differences between council and NHS grades for joint posts; NHS salary is higher than council salary for the same job.
classic33
Leg End Member
My current ones are all 28 days only, no longer.
I can make the request, but still have to wait until two days before.
Online is not an option, nor is e-mailing
In-house pharmacy decided to stop ordering one lot because they were too hard to get.
Below is a weeks usage. Twelve times that in one go.
Pharmacy is a private contractor, it's a 'service' for which they aren't paid a single penny. Pharmacies do it as they fear losing business and 'everyone else does it'. In the case of ones on the premises they can use a lot of anti-competitive practices to muscle in and it's a lot more economical. In the case of many others they lose money ordering prescriptions.
It 'works seemlessly' with some repeats because unbeknown to a lot of patients the next prescription is generated about 2-10 minutes later after it has been collected and gone through. Unfortunately it's not like that for everyone, although you seem fairly unusual in that you seem very happy for 3 months at a time, a lot of people moan and want 12 months.
classic33
Leg End Member
I'd be happy just having them. The alternative can often mean staring up at the ceiling in an A&E department again. Which isn't what they're there for(Personal opinion).
classic33
Leg End Member
Not aware of any council A&E nurses, or police officers.
What's the online is not an option thing all about? Since last year GP surgeries MUST let you order your repeats on-line, it is mandated (all too late imho).
Unfortunately there's no mandate for electronic prescriptions in the other direction (very foolish of the NHS), I have to deal with a surgery that simply refuses to go on despite many requests by patients. This surgery and another one are made to look ever more ridiculous as the months roll by as all the straggler surgeries elsewhere in the CCG are going live now/soon.
classic33
Leg End Member
I need to be seen by a doctor(each time) before they'll allow me to order online. Their rules.
You have no repeatable items - it does happen.
An unusual but bizarre system in your case. When seeing the doctor most of them do it on the spot, some future date it instead. Having you order every time separately after seeing the doctor just seems totally bizarre from their point of view as it's extra work. I've not heard of anything like this since one of my friends used to travel to a surgery several miles away and kept in the family I think since the 1940s/50s since his nannan used it - they had a highly unusual inhouse pharmacy set up too. He reluctantly moved to another surgery and that stopped. He's had enough of current pharmacy not able to get hold of stuff, so in the process of moving pharmacy to one with considerably better hours.
gavgav
Legendary Member
Working in the "useless tier of non clinical staff" myself, I can assure you that like in every large organisation, yes there are some useless ones but also some bloody good ones who are also sinking under a mountainous workload due to cuts, cuts and more cuts. An organisation needs its non clinical staff to do the bits that the clinical staff don't want to do and if they did have to would further limit the clinical time they have
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I logged on to apologise for my post from last night, I'd been drinking, but it seemed nobody was bothered anyway. 
IMO NHS staff (generally) live in a bubble, they've gone from education, to uni, to NHS. So, a trainee radiologist gets seconded to a porter, gets to go on smoke breaks, the radiologists haven't enough work to do, because nothing is scheduled, so they play on their phones (don't blame them) so the trainees do too, the behavior being endorsed by their superiors. And so it goes..............will the trainees be highly motivated employees later? After that introduction to "work"? I doubt it. We are all paying for this down time, professional people, doing nothing
Trolleys and chairs are "condemned" because they are not functioning correctly, leading to shortage of equipment, leading to patients missing their scans, meaning a whole lot of professional wages and expensive lab time wasted. Not to mention patient distress. Why are they condemned? Because they haven't been cleaned, the moving parts parts not lubricated and the bearings not greased. Why hasn't this basic maintenance been done? I have no idea, I just watch the replacement £kkk chairs arrive on trial, whilst with a basic tool kit and some WD40 I could put many other pieces of equipment back into use in a few hours.
I actually carry a multi tool so that I can work.
I could go on and on, but there is no point, nobody is listening. I have 5 immediate managers, they have a manager, who has manager, who has a manager, who has manager, that's as far as I've got, I have no idea how far the lineage goes.
IMO NHS staff (generally) live in a bubble, they've gone from education, to uni, to NHS. So, a trainee radiologist gets seconded to a porter, gets to go on smoke breaks, the radiologists haven't enough work to do, because nothing is scheduled, so they play on their phones (don't blame them) so the trainees do too, the behavior being endorsed by their superiors. And so it goes..............will the trainees be highly motivated employees later? After that introduction to "work"? I doubt it. We are all paying for this down time, professional people, doing nothing
Trolleys and chairs are "condemned" because they are not functioning correctly, leading to shortage of equipment, leading to patients missing their scans, meaning a whole lot of professional wages and expensive lab time wasted. Not to mention patient distress. Why are they condemned? Because they haven't been cleaned, the moving parts parts not lubricated and the bearings not greased. Why hasn't this basic maintenance been done? I have no idea, I just watch the replacement £kkk chairs arrive on trial, whilst with a basic tool kit and some WD40 I could put many other pieces of equipment back into use in a few hours.
I actually carry a multi tool so that I can work.
I could go on and on, but there is no point, nobody is listening. I have 5 immediate managers, they have a manager, who has manager, who has a manager, who has manager, that's as far as I've got, I have no idea how far the lineage goes.
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Reynard
Guru
- Location
- Cambridgeshire, UK
My mum worked as a district nursing sister from around 1980 through to 1994 when she retired. Prior to that she was a matron in the military. She still talks about the shocking amounts of waste and abuse of the system that she saw back when she was on the district.
Things like crutches and bath aids being skipped or discarded on the street because the service wouldn't take them back. If people brought them back to the surgery, these items would still get binned because no one could be bothered to process the paperwork or clean them for re-use.
Where she worked, medication and consumables stockpiling seemed to be a favourite hobby of some of her patients. That was until the surgery worked out a deal with a pharmacy a couple of doors down to automatically renew and deliver what was needed based on regular assessments.
On a regular basis she'd take out students. It used to irritate her no end when they showed little or no interest in what she was doing, and when she'd ask why, they'd say "oh, we want to go into management." She had no truck with those students, because she used to say to me "how the hell can them manage if they don't know how the work is done."
Mum reckons she could write a book about her experiences...
