Prescription Quantities

Some time ago we took the decision to set prescription quantities to 56 days as our standard policy.

This decision came from when we merged the 3 practices – West Bar Surgery, Horsefair Surgery and Banbury Health Centre who all prescribed for different time periods: 28-day, 56 day and 84 days. We chose 56 days as we felt this kept a balance between patient convenience (means you aren’t ordering medication each month) and wastage of medicines (which is known to be much higher when prescribing bigger quantities).  

Oxfordshire CCG allow practices to determine their own repeat medication terms and please note that they would actually prefer us to only issue 28 days, not 56 which is the amount we have decided as a Practice to go with.

This change has been introduced across the practice and therefore you may see your prescription quantities increased, decreased, or remain the same!

There are certain medicines where we can only prescribe 28 days at a time e.g. Morphine due to the type of medicine it is. There are other exceptions such as HRT medicines or Contraceptive pills where we prescribe in larger quantities. There are also other circumstances where we might prescribe in smaller quantities for safety reasons for example.