[log in to unmask],Net wrote at 13:52 on 17/09/98
about "Private script for Viagra":
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>We have had a letter from the local pharmaceutical adviser stating that
>"We cannot write a private prescription of Viagra to any of our
>patients registered with the practice." We can
>do so to anybody else. It claims that this directive has come from the
>NHSE.
>Surely, this can't be right. If one of my patients wanted to see me
>privately I can prescribe whatever I like as this is a private
>arrangement. Is there anywhere that states that I cannot treat a NHS
>patient of mine privately??
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N&E Devon HA have sent us a wide selection of faxes, correction faxes
and advice and corrected advice, including one item cascaded down
the allegedly rapid notification system of Epinet.
This was dated 14 Sept, labeleld urgent by Graham Winyard at the
DoH.
An indication of "urgent" may be gathered from teh fax machine date
of 15 Sept on it.
Needless to say, N&E produced a covering letter, dated for reasons
it would no doubt be trivial to enquire into August 19th, which is
marked as having gone to BT Featurenet on the 15th.
It became available to me on the 16th.
In the time between the initiation of the cascade and my seeing it I
had dealt with approximately 300 e-mailed messages, of which if any
had taken more than a day to be seen it was because of delay in
their authors linking to the net.
The only useful bit of advice out of the whole lot is that the HA
considers that a GP who offers a private prescription to his NHS
patient is likely to be in breach of his terms of service. The
prescribing adviser, attempting to clear up the confusion caused by
her previous fax, notes that Viagra has not been blacklisted, it is
just advice by the DoH.
So, there is clearly no legal interdiction on prescribing Viagra on
an NHS FP10, nor is there any garantee given that a GP who declines
to do so would be protected in a service ctee hearing - although the
Sec State for Health is of course the appeal authority ...
The bit I get out of this is that teh HA who claim to have been
prevented
by shortage of money form cooperaiting in setting up a general
e-mail and bulletin board system for among other things messages
such as this are still so far behind in thinking about highly
visible matters that they spend three to four times as much (some of
it limp wrinkly fax paper costs infliceted upon GPs) on promulgating
this crap as need be, which is far more than the marginal costs of
an arbitrarily large number of messages over an e-mail system.
Ha.
--- OffRoad 1.9r registered to Adrian Midgley
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