Shared Care for Your Medicine – Information for Patients

What is Shared Care?

Shared Care means your hospital specialist and your GP share responsibility for prescribing and monitoring a medicine you’ve been started on in hospital. It only happens when all parties agree it’s safe and appropriate.

Why might this be offered?

It can make your care more convenient and joined‑up. Your specialist keeps overseeing your condition, while your GP can issue prescriptions and arrange routine tests locally.

Our practice rules

GPs are not contractually obliged to take on shared care prescribing, and it causes significant additional work for the practice, however we recognise it is often more convenient for patients getting their prescriptions from us rather than from specialists. Therefore, we do often accept shared care from local NHS specialists (with whom we have long‑standing relationships and trust their support systems) for common medicines. We must keep this under regular review depending on funding for this additional workload, and also impact on the rest of the services we offer.

We only accept private shared care in exceptional cases when the provider is local and offers NHS‑equivalent support. We do NOT accept shared care from out‑of‑area specialists because we lack established relationships, their reporting structures are unfamiliar, requests are increasing via Right to Choose, and past experiences showed some providers did not meet their responsibilities.

Your responsibilities

• Attend appointments and blood tests when scheduled.
• Take your medicine exactly as prescribed and order repeats in time.
• Tell us promptly about side effects, pregnancy, new medicines, or changes in your condition.

FAQs

• Will my GP always take over? No. Shared Care is voluntary and only happens when it’s safe and meets our criteria.
• Do private or out‑of‑area specialists use Shared Care? Private: only in exceptional local cases with NHS‑level support. Out‑of‑area: we do not accept these requests for safety and governance reasons.
• Why these rules? They protect patient safety. We know local NHS teams well and trust their helplines and procedures. We cannot guarantee safe prescribing with unfamiliar providers, and past cases showed risks when agreements weren’t upheld.
• Why these rules? They protect patient safety. We know local NHS teams well and trust their helplines and procedures. We cannot guarantee safe prescribing with unfamiliar providers, and past cases showed risks when agreements weren’t upheld.