[Discussion] private prescription is doing more work than we give it credit for
private prescription is doing more work than we give it credit for, which sounds obvious until you try to state the evidence for it.
In England, specialist weight management services are commissioned locally, so eligibility criteria and waiting times differ by ICB. There is no single national threshold to quote.
Discharge from a specialist service at goal is a normal end point of that pathway. Whether prescribing continues in primary care afterwards is a local decision and is worth asking about at the start rather than at the end.
Supply notices from the regulator describe expected availability at a national level. They do not predict what any individual pharmacy has on the shelf next week.
Not medical advice, obviously, and nothing here is approved for human use. One person with a spreadsheet.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Pharmacy staff name removed. The pharmacy itself can be named in a pricing post.
Pharmacy staff name removed.
Disagreeing with this line: that is the arrangement in one nation and the question is about another.
The online consultation asked me three questions, none of them about my history. I did not go ahead.
Correction: that threshold is your ICB’s, not a national one. They differ and they change by year.
GP said no in the spring, specialist said yes eighteen months later. Same person, same numbers.
Concentrations can differ between products and between pharmacies. Switching mid-titration means redoing the arithmetic rather than carrying the old unit count across.
Concentrations can differ between products and between pharmacies.
Agreed — and keeping the letters with dates is what makes any later challenge possible.
Right, and reading the actual supply notice rather than the coverage of it saves a fortnight of speculation.
Agreed. The ICB variation is the thing that makes national advice useless here.
BMI thresholds vary by ICB and by year
tier 3 waiting lists are measured in years, not months
Not convinced — the US threads are a different system entirely and importing their advice here does real harm.
Why the monthly pricing tracker works, and the rule that makes it work.
Members post the pharmacy, the product, the month and the price they actually paid — not an advertised offer, not a first-month discount. No links of any kind are permitted, which removes the entire incentive to post anything other than what happened.
The result is that the spread between pharmacies in a given month is visible, and it is consistently larger than people expect. That single table has saved members here more money than every other thread on the board combined, and it survives only because the no-links rule is enforced without exception.
Four pharmacies, four prices, same product, same month. The spread was larger than I expected and none of them were the headline offer.
Two years and four months on a tier 3 list. Referral date and every letter kept, which turned out to matter when the service reorganised.
Yes — four nations, four pathways, and threads that ignore that give people the wrong answer confidently.
This. The monthly pricing tracker is the most useful thing on this board and it works because nobody is allowed to link anything.
ask the pharmacy for the price list, not the headline offer
the ICB decides the threshold and they are not the same across England
the ICB decides the threshold and they are not the same across England
This is why national advice does not work here. It is commissioned locally and it varies.
Is this a discharge back to the GP, or a discontinuation?
This.
Adding the practical bit — ask what happens at discharge before you start, not after.
- 1Two years and four months on a tier 3 list. Referral date and every letter…8 comments in this branch · started by u/coring_the_stopper