By the way... Prescription fees rip off patients

soon your medicine could carry a label telling you how much it actually costs the NHS.

That was the plan announced last week by Jeremy Hunt, and will affect medication valued at over £20. The scheme is designed to ensure the patient reflects on what they are receiving, hopefully nudging them into taking the drug exactly as prescribed.

I am reminded about the story I heard from our practice nurse who had discovered that her father, a retired naval officer, had been hoarding a vast collection of unopened packs of simvastatin.

When questioned, he explained that he was concerned about the side-effects of statins. Besides, he felt entirely well, and, in his late Eighties did not believe that he would gain any benefit from what was, in his case, preventative treatment. But he had great respect for his GP and had no intention of disappointing him, so he continued to receive his periodic repeat prescription.

Perhaps if he’d seen the true cost of all this, he might have at least been willing to talk to his GP abut stopping his ‘needless’ repeat prescriptions. All very sensible, but this new plan also masks a clever little earner for the NHS at patients’ expense.

When my son was at York University he saw a GP at the student health centre for treatment of infected eczema, then raging during hay-fever season. He was given a prescription for four items: an antihistamine, a cream, an antibiotic, and some eye drops.

The prescription charge back then was more than £7 per item, but nobody took the time to explain that three of the items could be bought over the counter for less than half of that amount; even on a private prescription, the antibiotic would also have been less than £7.

I think £28 is quite a lot for a 20-year-old student to find (not to mention the fact that if he’d been at university in Wales or scotland there would have been no charge at all).

I wonder how many people would pay the current prescription charge of £8.20 per item for medication if they knew their medicine costs less than that?

of course they will not know — the new labelling only applies when the value is more than £20.

I have no wish to rain on Jeremy Hunt’s parade, but it’s just a thought.