I know the system can work well for a lot of patients, but for both my wife and i, it's a pain in the neck.
My wife has to use morphine patches to control pain, and whilst you can order the patches using the surgeries on line repeat prescription, the morphine prescriptionis not allowed to sent electronically to the pharmacy, because it's a controlled drug. Surprisingly paracetamol cannot be sent electronically either, and that is not a controlled drug!
Because of my wife's multiple conditions, she is on a complex cocktail of drugs, some have contraindications and when she first tried the on line ordering, the medic that has to approve or reject the requested items chose not to allow some of her prescription to be dispensed, because of the contraindications. What a mess of trouble that caused.
Then there is the pharmacy (Tesco's) who when it was discovered that some drugs could not be sent electronically, we requested them to physically collect the scripts, but they failed to request the controlled
drugs so those scripts were not dispensed, a fact that was not discovered until we were unpacking them at home. More inecessary journeys to sort it out.
The pharmacy is frequntly unable to complete the full prescription. We often get shortages notes, needing us (usually me) to make more journeys to get it completed
My wife has to have monthly blood tests to monitor her conditions. About a week after she has consultation with our gp. He is great, he explains the importance and meaning of the results, he explains any changes to her medication, and he takes her repeat prescription and issues the newscripts there and then
We still have to face the short comings of all the pharmacies in town. On no occasion has any of them been able to fulfill the whole prescription while we wait, so I now drop them of at Tesco's, and arrange to collect the next day, so the have time to order any out of stock items. E X the last time I left it 2 working days, and they still hadn't got all the items!
I estimate I spend about 15% of my annual mileage on medical related matters.