Asthma Bureaucracy Grumble

[bunn]

I'd love to reduce the burden on pressured NHS services by not having to book appointments for asthma checkups.  Can I not be trusted to contact the surgery if I am actually ill, rather than just needing a repeat prescription?  I'm healthy. I have strangely huge lungs actually, which I put down to much early clarinet-playing and underwater swimming. I can swim underwater for ages.  If I ever end up in one of those movies where one has to urgently swim through an underwater tunnel, I am quids in.

 I just have a minor condition that occasionally causes my lungs to occasionally curl up and go DON'T WANNA!!. I know asthma can be major and life-threatening, but mine isn't, it's just annoying.  I really wish I could just buy inhalers from a pharmacist.   Oddly, I can buy treatment for the eczema that made me really proper ill a year or so ago, over the counter, and I can buy antihistamines for the hayfever that sometimes triggers the asthma.  But not an inhaler to zap the little bugger with once it's rolled onto the scene.

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I am occasionally called in for a repeat prescription review, where the doctor asks if I still want this, and I say yes, for each item. This seems about as good a way of spending my, and the doctor's, and the receptionist's, time.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It does seem like there should be potential for a 'nothing has changed please renew' option. Can there really be so many people ordering drugs they don't need that the cost of these would outweigh the savings from all the 'same old same old' appointments?

I'm lucky really in that our local surgery is unusually undersubscribed and well-staffed, it's just that the appt followed by going again to get the stuff once they've processed the prescription seems such a waste of time for everyone involved.

[timetiger.livejournal.com]

Bureaucracies. Feh.

[lindahoyland.livejournal.com]

My Dr's lets you choose whether to attend clinics or not. You just have to have your medications reviewed each year.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That sounds very sensible. I only have this one medication and I only need to get a refill about once a year, so I have to have a checkup every time...

[sistermine.livejournal.com]

Just looking through my lj, and loved the idea of you with huge lungs volunteering for the "underwater flooded tunnel swimming scene". I seem to have read that in several books, so there's definitely a demand! Go Girl.

(And more power to your elbow re the self-management of asthma etc - there does seem to be a little movement on this kind of thing in the NHS at the moment; chiefly cos it'll save money.)