This year has already seen a lot of changes that give local chemists such as Travel Clinics in Jersey greater power and responsibility to take care of people in their area in between appointments with a GP.
The biggest and most notable of these is Pharmacy First, an initiative that allows trained community pharmacists to provide NHS prescriptions for seven common conditions where prescription medicine may be required.
However, one quite major change that is set to come into force at the start of 2025 is a set of changes to Original Pack Dispensing rules intended to help make it easier for people to get the prescriptions they need in a way that makes it easy to manage.
To understand why, it is important to know what a prescription is and why an original pack might not always be dispensed.
Strange Partitions
A medical prescription provided by a GP, specialist or community pharmacist is an exact direction to a pharmacist to dispense the exact amount of the exact medication listed on the prescription, and this necessary precision does have some unforeseen side effects.
The main one that some patients will notice is that, with few exceptions, a standard pharmaceutical name will be written on the prescription as opposed to a brand name to reduce costs and increase availability outside of cases where using a specific brand is strictly necessary.
For example, if you are prescribed a certain dose of atorvastatin, that prescription can be from any manufacturer, whilst if you are prescribed Lipitor, a pharmacist must dispense the brand name version.
Another side effect is that a prescription may call for the dispensing of a course of medication of a quantity different to that of a standard pack. For example, some medications are supplied in packs of 16 but the prescription may call for a 15-dose course.
If this is the case, the pharmacist may have to open an original package, remove the extra dose and supply the rest either with the tamper-evident seal broken or in a dispensing box with the exact amount portioned out.
This can make it harder to manage a supply of tablets, for example, if someone checks the blister pack itself to see how many doses they have left and if they have taken a dose that day.
It can also mean that the patient information leaflet is not included with the dispensing box, and it can slow down any automated dispensing process since the primary process does not allow for splitting the package.
An alternative solution to this is to allow pharmacists the flexibility to dispense slightly more or slightly less than the prescribed quantity to allow for a full original pack to be used, in cases where this is appropriate.
Antibiotics or steroids, for example, are unlikely to be dispensed according to OPD, medicines containing valproate, controlled substances and any medicines which cannot be practically split, such as inhalers or medicines supplied in a way that cannot be dispensed exactly.
These rules are already in force in Scotland and for private prescriptions, but are set to come into force in England and Wales in the new year.