Hospital medication request

If you have been treated by a hospital doctor either as an inpatient or outpatient they may decide to give you a new prescription or change an existing one.

If you are handed a prescription in hard copy, it will be in one of two colours:

White – to be used at the hospital’s own pharmacy;

Green – to be taken to any community pharmacy.

Normally the prescription will be for enough medication to last at least two weeks.

If your consultation has not been in person your doctor should be able to scan a green prescription to the community pharmacist of your choice and also send the original in the post to you. Your consultant will then contact us to advise an ongoing prescription that LWP can issue.

The time from a prescription being written for you to our doctors being able to issue you with your new medication can take two working weeks. This is often due to the time lag in receiving the information from the hospital before we can process and match the request to your records safely.

Sometimes as clinicians we may require further information before we can issue your prescription. Patient safety is paramount and where a prescription request is unclear we will need to clarify this directly with the hospital. This is especially important with controlled drugs or medicines that require close monitoring. Whenever safe to do so we will provide a short term prescription until the query has been resolved. 

If you have any queries about when your medication will be issued please complete an eConsult and we will update you. Thank you for your patience. 

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