Pharmacists are divided over revelations that GPs prescribed hundreds of thousands of readily available items such as shampoo, sunscreen and vitamin products on the NHS last year.

The sector voiced a mixed reaction to data released by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) on Wednesday (April 8), which showed that prescribers called for £13 million worth of sunscreen, £2.6 million in multivitamins and £17 million worth of fluoride products including toothpaste and Colgate mouthwash in 2014.

Among the 1.1 billion items prescribed in the community – mostly by GPs, but the data also includes scripts written by non-medical prescribers – there were 400 packets of Berocca tablets and 4,600 packs of Neutrogena shampoo.

Sid Dajani, contractor and member of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s English Pharmacy Board, said the data was indicative of a problem he had been aware of for a while. “You know it definitely happens but you can’t verify what prescriptions are for unless it’s really blatant that something underhand is going on,” he said.

But Graham Phillips, owner of Manor Pharmacy Group (Wheathampstead) Ltd in Hertfordshire, disagreed that the prescribing of readily available items was a widespread problem. He pointed out that prescriptions for products such as sunscreen were often legitimate in cases where medicines had increased a patient’s photosensitivity.

The £13m worth of sunscreen represented “a tiny percentage of the drugs budget” – it would be 0.15 per cent of the £8.9 billion cost in 2014, according to the HSCIC data. The “vast majority” of over-the-counter items were blacklisted for prescribers, Mr Phillips added. “GPs can’t prescribe a bag of sugar and three gold wotsits.

“I guarantee that the idea that GPs are writing Berocca prescriptions left, right and centre is just rubbish. GP prescriptions are looked at carefully by local teams and any significant abuse of the system would stand out a mile,” Mr Phillips added. 

Essex LPC chief executive Ash Pandya said he recognised the need to monitor abuse of the system, but believed that “the good outweighed the bad” in prescribing practice.

He agreed with Mr Dajani and Mr Phillips that access to patient records would help pharmacists to raise the alarm in cases where the system was being abused. “[This] would mean pharmacists are better placed to make decisions rather than taking wild stabs in the dark and trying to guess why the patient has been given a certain prescription,” he said.

Pharmacy Voice did not comment on the validity of GP prescribing, but pointed out that the values in the report needed to be put in the context of the total cost of prescribed items.
 

Should readily available products be prescribed on the NHS? 

We want to hear your views, but please express them in the spirit of a constructive, professional debate. For more information about what this means, please click here to see our community principles and information