Pharmacy services

The Minor Ailment and Chronic Medication Services defined in the Pharmacy contract have a requirement for patient registration. Only patients who are eligible can register for these services.

The NHS Minor Ailment Service at Your Community Pharmacy

The Minor Ailment Service will allow patients who are registered for the service to go straight to their community pharmacist for advice on common conditions that they can self treat. Where appropriate the pharmacist can supply the medicine directly, thus eliminating the need for a GP appointment.

The NHS Chronic Medication Service at Your Community Pharmacy

For those patients with ongoing conditions, the community pharmacist can play a more active role in the management of their care on the basis of one electronic authorisation from the patient’s GP, whose input will be on a six or twelve month basis, rather than the current practice of multiple visits.

Both these examples save time to the patient, the GP and the pharmacist.

NHS NSS Practitioner Services are responsible for paying community pharmacists, dispensing doctors and appliance suppliers and for ensuring that all such payments are properly audited.

Payment Verification - Monitoring of Patient Services (Pharmacy)

Payment Verification (Pharmacy) acts on behalf of the Scottish Government & NHS Boards to ensure that Pharmacists are paid correctly, according to the services and items that they have dispensed to NHS patients. Pharmacists are aware that routine checks are carried out as part of our payment verification work.

As part of our monitoring procedures, patients are randomly selected and contacted to confirm certain details of the services they have received.

Practitioner Services Pharmacy is responsible for receiving and pricing all NHS prescriptions dispensed in Scotland and ensures that community pharmacists, dispensing doctors and appliance suppliers are accurately paid both for their dispensing services and the costs of issued drugs.

Prescriptions are delivered to our Livingston office, where they are scanned and the images are then sent electronically to the processing offices in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow, where they are validated and priced. Payment statements are produced for each individual contractor prior to payments being made. While the payment system automatically validates each prescription, there are procedures in place to ensure probity and assure the accuracy and acceptability of forms submitted.

Find out more about prescribing and dispensing.

Handling Personal Health Information

The NHS will use the information contained on the prescription form to find out what was prescribed and how much it cost and to calculate the payment due to the person who dispensed your prescription. The NHS Scotland Counter Fraud Service also has access to the information on this form.