Prescriptions for chronic treatment given extension
The aim is to ease the workload of doctors
PRESCRIBED treatments for chronic conditions have been extended for another two months by the regional health department.
The region’s pharmaceutical provision system (GAIA) calculates that more than 550,000 patients need their treatments renewed in February or March. This measure affects such treatments that were planned for 180 days or more and were due to expire before March 31, explained a health department spokesman.
As well as ensuring that the health of people with chronic conditions is not compromised by their prescriptions expiring, the aim is to ease the workload of doctors by ‘reducing administrative procedures, without detracting from the necessary control and responsibility they must exercise when starting, continuing or suspending pharmaceutical treatments or issuing their respective prescriptions’. The aim is to reduce problems resulting from the pandemic – such as the need for social distancing, changes to in-person and remote appointments, and a larger workload on primary care – that could be exacerbated by regular checkups on all these patients.
Not having as many of these monthly check-ups also frees up resources for all the other duties and activities of family and community medicine, the spokesman continued.
The prolongation does not apply to treatments lasting less than 180 days, acute treatments, master formulae, narcotic medications, or treatments applied for a single three-month or six-month period.
Nor does it apply to treatments which require additional authorisation to be financed by the health system, nor to medications which have an established maximum duration.
The electronic prescription system allows them to be extended
temporarily for up to 365 days, and then when that period ends they must be extended again in order to remain valid.
During the home confinement period of the first state of emergency from March to June 2020, procedures to enable remote appointments and extend prescriptions were widely accepted by the general public and medical professionals, and benefitted 987,192 people in the region, the spokesman noted.
The third automatic prolongation of chronic treatments, from October to December 2020, cut the number of appointments at health centres by more than 660,000.