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Department of Health

Repeat prescriptions are sometimes numerically limited so that one has one, four or five out of six. After that, it is doctors’ clinical responsibility to ensure that they see the patient before any further prescribing of the drug. However, what happens in the real world is not always consistent with that. Occasionally, that is at great cost to the individual concerned, but it is always at great cost to everyone because safety incidents cost the NHS approximately £2 billion a year in bed days in our acute sector. They are problems for clinicians and everyone.