Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has taken steps to ensure that pharmacists do not accidentally indicate that a patient is eligible for a waiver on prescription payments.

Real Time Exemption Checking (RTEC) is in operation across the majority of community pharmacies in England. This enables pharmacies to confirm a person’s eligibility for free National Health Service prescriptions through real-time checks of NHS and Department for Work and Pensions data, prior to dispensing their prescription items. Where RTEC is in place and finds a valid exemption for a patient, they are not required to sign a patient declaration confirming their exemption.

In cases where RTEC is not used and a patient makes a declaration that they are exempt from paying an NHS prescription charge, pharmacy staff must ask them to sign a declaration and produce evidence. Pharmacies must advise the person claiming an exemption, where evidence is required but not provided, that the NHS undertakes checks to verify that such persons are eligible for free prescriptions. This is a legislative requirement of a pharmacist’s terms of service. It should be noted that pharmacists are instructed to dispense prescriptions whether or not evidence is seen.