North Curry Health Centre is a dispensing practice. This means that we are allowed to dispense medication to those patients who live more than a mile from a pharmacy.
Patients can collect medication as they leave the building following a consultation, rather than having to collect a prescription, travel to a pharmacy and wait for their medication and then drive back home. This may be particularly important when you are unwell and need urgent treatment. We offer a one-stop-shop service.
But it is more than that; we have trained dispensers who can check your notes and make sure you are receiving the correct medication, quantities and check for interactions to other medication. They also have access to your GP to check on queries, medication and clinical issues on your behalf. We offer a patient-focused service to our patients.
Please continue to use our dispensary (dispensing patients) if you don’t want to risk losing our services. The dispensary subsidises the whole practice financially! It enables us to employ additional staff and without it the practice would not be viable. Please support us! There are certain online pharmacies in particular who are on a drive to increase business. They are not ‘part of the NHS’ and we are not affiliated with them. They are taking resources away from the community pharmacies and dispensing GPs.
Patients do have the choice of taking their prescription away and getting the medication from any pharmacy should they so wish. If there are areas in which we could improve our service to you, please let us know, as we rely on you using your dispensary to subsidise your local practice.
Hospital, dental and private presrciptions
Please hand any hospital or dental prescriptions to a member of the dispensery team. There are certain legal requirements that must be present on a prescription before it can be legally dispensed.
If you drop a prescription into the surgery without handing it to a member of the dispensary staff to check first, you may have to return to the surgery to collect the prescription later. You will then have to take the prescription back to the prescriber if these requirements are not met.
Please notep private prescriptions may be dispensed at the surgery but there will be a cost. The cost charged is dependent on the cost of the medication prescribed.
For us to dispense these prescriptions please allow TWO WORKING DAYS, alternatively you can take the prescription to a chemist and collect immediately.