Repeat prescribing
The Department of Health and Social Care published the National Overprescribing Review, ‘Good for you, good for us, good for everybody’ in 2021. Following this, in 2023, the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (RPS) were commissioned by NHS England to develop a resource to address recommendation 7 of the National Overprescribing Review, for use in primary care to improve repeat prescribing.
The RCGP and RPS, together with an expert working group of key stakeholders including GPs, practice pharmacists, practice managers, reception staff, community pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, and patients, have developed a Repeat Prescribing toolkit. This Toolkit is the first national good practice guidance on repeat prescribing in 20 years.
The Repeat Prescribing toolkit aims to support GP practice teams and primary care networks, working with community pharmacies and patients, to create a collaborative, safe and efficient process for repeat prescribing to improve practice processes, patient care, and reducing waste. The toolkit also includes practical guidance on improving communication with patients about repeat prescribing, supported by good practice case studies, flow charts, action plan templates, and other useful resources.
It is important to note that this toolkit focuses on repeat medication only; acute medicines and appliances are outside the scope of this work. Additionally, it is NOT a clinical or prescribing guideline. However, it does identify some higher-risk clinical scenarios that practices or PCNs should pay particular attention to.
Safe and appropriate prescribing is a key skill for GPs, with decisions based on the unique circumstances of every patient. This focus on repeat prescribing is important as repeat prescribing makes up a large part of general practice workload and we need to make sure we are always streamlining and improving the processes.
We encourage all GP practices to work together with their local community pharmacies and to consider if their repeat prescribing systems can be improved in terms of efficiency, safety and patient care.
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