Prescribing Policy

The GPs at Henley in Arden Medical Centre believe that providing the best quality care to our patients is our top priority. When a prescription is necessary our main considerations are effectiveness and safety.

To prioritise patient safety and the best value to the NHS, we are bound to prescribing from an approved list of medications within the Coventry and Warwickshire Area Prescribing Policy.

This policy informs us on whether medications can be safely prescribed by GPs, whether they must be started and monitored by a hospital doctor/specialist or whether they are not recommended as safe or effective treatments.

For the Practice to take on prescribing of a “Shared Care Drug”, the following criteria must be met:

• NHS shared care agreement signed by a Specialist present in the medical record
• You must have been stable on the medication for 12 weeks under the care of a specialist

The Practice may not be able to issue you with an NHS prescription following a private consultation for the following reasons:

• If the Practice considers that there is not a clear clinical indication for the prescription, and that in the same circumstances an NHS patient would not be offered this treatment
• If the private doctor recommends a new or experimental treatment, or recommends prescribing a medication outside of its licensed indication or outside of our formulary recommendations
• If the medication is not generally provided within the NHS
• We do not accept requests to prescribe “Shared Care Drugs” from any Non-NHS 

Providers

• If the medication is of a very specialised nature requiring ongoing monitoring, we may be unable to accept responsibility for the prescription. This includes medication that we can prescribe on the NHS but requires what is known as a “Shared Care Agreement”. This would include, but is not limited to, what are known as Disease Modifying Drugs, IVF associated medications and those to treat ADHD.

If we are unable to issue an NHS prescription you can still obtain the medication recommended via a private prescription from the consultant you have seen but we would recommend that you investigate the cost of this and associated monitoring before proceeding.