What is a medication review?
A medication review is a meeting with your doctor, or nurse (depending on the medication) to talk about your medicines.
Your medicines should be reviewed regularly (usually every 6 months) to check that they are right for you.
For safe drug prescribing, it is important that patients book in for requested blood tests, blood pressure checks and medication reviews as requested by clinicians.
Why are medicines reviews needed?
When you are first prescribed a medicine, your doctor, pharmacist and/or nurse checks that it is the best medicine for you. However, things can change, for example:
-You might have developed a side effect from the medicine.
- Your health might have changed, such as developing a long-term condition.
- You might have started taking other additional medicines.
- The guidelines for treating your condition might have changed.
- You may be taking a large number of medications.
- A medication you are on may be no longer essential for your health day to day.
All of these factors can affect whether a medicine remains the best choice for you...
It is vital that you keep up to date with your medication reviews.
If you have medication on repeat and do not keep up with your reviews it WILL take longer to process any request you put in. This is because the dispensary staff are not allowed to issue any medication on your repeats if you are past your review date, therefore the request has to go to the Doctors to be actioned, which inevitably takes longer to process.
Medication Reviews can be done over the telephone. Please ask at reception for more information.
