https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/04/nhs-fines-mothers-for-c…
Pregnant women are entitled to free medication on NHS. However, that entitlement arises only if a doctor, midwife, etc. applies for a maternity exemption certificate for them.
But two things frequently appear to go wrong: midwives make errors on applying for the certificates, or forget to apply at all, and pharmacists fail to ask for proof of exemption.
The women then face backdated bills for their medication, plus fines amounting to five times each prescription charge up to £100.
Surely all of this stuff should be linked to NHS number and just done without all the bureaucracy? I'd get the Tesco Clubcard team to run the NHS - they'd have to do a better job than the current lot.
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Just buy the NHS one of the document management systems we use so that anyone in the organisation has instant access to your records rather than using a myriad of different systems including some which are still paper based. It really doesn’t need a bespoke system built at enormous expense.
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SS, how will that create opportunities for friends of ministers and civil servants to profit exorbitnatly at our cost?
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A link to NHS number is the obvious way. Now that I'm over 60 I get free prescriptions anyway, which is helpful, though I doubt whether many women want to leave it that late.
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Not sure Fujitsu is owned by a friend of a minister…
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completely dickless
they need to stop imposing any form of obligation on patients with regard to the use of the NHS, given how administratively fvcking hopeless it is, or you just end up with post office horizon type stuff
it’s free and we’ve all been raised to believe it’s free and, to the extent there are ways in which it isn’t free, nobody understands these because they’ve never been properly communicated, so just keep it fvcking free FGS
we’d rather it was shit (and faod it isn’t shit) then complicated
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