Prescribing creep.

If you have not yet discovered the peculiar style of the medical blogger the Witch Doctor you may not be aware of the concept of creep. If we can try and precis many of Witchypoo’s posts, it is the process by which change is imposed by subtle small changes within an alleged democratic society to the point that the end result is that which a totalitarian state would impose from the start.

Think Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or Za Nu Labour’s attack on the NHS and you might get an idea of the general method of creep aka REFORM for the better that ultimately leads to a worse net end result albeit by small, subtle changes all passively approved for no-one sees or realizes the bigger picture.

This process is still ongoing and recently surfaced in seemingly innocent, but ultimately insidious, developments in the way a small Northernshire GP practice accesses their own patients’ medical records and issues their repeat prescriptions.

A few years ago we had some visits from what we shall term the Al Qaeda school of radical pharmacists who were employed by the local Soviet. This clique had done some Party sponsored “audits” and it would seem that certain prescribing criteria were deficient in their humble ill informed, ignorant opinions.

As we sat around their campfires words of revolutionary zeal like “concordance”, “equivalence” and “co-equivalence” were muttered but we drank their tea and coffee and thought “what are they talking about?” as we inhaled the smoke from their campfires long into the night.

None of these words had we ever heard before in the first world we inhabit. Some of us had been educated in undergraduate pharmacology, clinical pharmacology and postgraduate lectures regarding pharmacology but we had never heard these holy words before. We had even met with pharmacists to discuss the dark arts of dispensing but never heard such magic words before.

We asked them from behind their masked faces to quote their sources. This was akin to prizing limpets from a rock, always a good way to identify those trying to shaft one, but eventually we got an answer. It would appear that the source of the radical Al Qaeda school of pharmacists is none other than an alleged university in the Midlands of the UK.

This university is not known for producing anything academic for when some of us were at school any parent with a thick child called Precious, who academically would struggle to only ever get to a minor Polytechnic, could always get them to go to an alleged “university” and do social sciences or media studies at this university and so get a “university” degree in a nousetoanyoneology.

So we wasted several hours of our time with these Al Qaeda operatives and came away thinking what a load of b*ll*cks. This painfully acquired but useless information was placed in the filing cabinet of the brain aka waste bin and left to do nothing useful.

Fast forward and the local Soviet are now promoting the Electronic Prescription Service and you can read the propaganda here. Remember Choose and Book? Another “paperless” centrally imposed system coming our way with all its benefits? Just read the propaganda. Things will surely be so much better like Choose and Book.

Well move on with the creep and have any other doctors noticed changes to the way they are being prompting to log into their Practice’s computer system?

Anyone noticed that whereas before each practice could set its own access rights for individual users and its own passwords there are now at least 2 prompts for a Party Card or NHS "Smartcard" when logging in?

Remember how under Za Nu Labour’s new GP contract responsibility for IT became the responsibility of the local Soviet aka PCT with no doubt efficiency savings, sorry comrades, new word is “gains”?

So where does all of this lead to?

Well the simple act of a GP reauthorizing a patient’s repeat medication led to a message saying that the prescription was not Party approved for the EPS system and one of the three holy words from earlier appeared on the screen.

As a result the practice’s computer system would not allow a GP to issue a prescription for one of their patients because it did not comply with a central diktat. The prescription itself had no errors but the Party said no. It was not EPS compliant.

Result a hand written prescription as a GP could not issue the prescription. Result all details had to be entered manually so combined with the handwritten prescription progress had lengthened the simple act of issuing a repeat prescription. The thin end of a longer wedge in a paperless Electronic Prescription System?

So to our simple Northernshire minds the legacy of Soviet Za Nu Labour’s centralization of medicine, combined with radical Al Queda pharmacists means that GPs can no longer prescribe unless it meets Party approved “standards”.

By way of some other EPS bits all of our receptionists who have been trained by these radical pharmacists have asked us what do we think re EPS? Our replies have been curt as we had the same “training” from the same radicals a couple of years ago but all our staff have said the same one thing about the EPS.

It is a fraudster’s field day.

And best of all in order to use this pile of very expensive taxpayers’ funded useless pile of sh*te you will now need to use a Party Card or Smartcard. No doubt as our log in screens now prompt us to use a Smartcard we can see where this is going and it is not big or clever.

Praise be to the Party for ensuring that all who work for the Party will have to have a Party Card. We all know that the Party Card is there to protect your data from those who would want to hack it.

Or is it there for the Party to control those who are allowed to work, and especially prescribe, in medicine?