GP10N(SS) Nurse Prescription Guidance

While the guidance in this article is predominantly intended for nurse prescribers working in GP Practices, the general guidance applies to printed prescriptions generated by all prescriber roles.

When printing prescriptions, it is very important that all the key information is included as this enables:

• Practitioner Services to efficiently process payments to community pharmacies for dispensing medication, with less staff intervention required to handle exceptions
• increased data quality with correct prescriber and patient level reporting in the Prescribing Information Store (PIS) of the Corporate Data Warehouse
• the cost of the prescriptions to be allocated to your GP Practice and not be reported as 'unallocated' at an NHS Board level.

What do I need to know?

All prescription text should be aligned correctly, and the mandatory fields placed in the correct areas of the form, ensuring it doesn't encroach on any other relevant printed details. The accompanying graphic demonstrates where all these areas are on the form. The mandatory fields are:

• patient's CHI number
• prescribed items
• prescriber code
• barcode on all GP10(SS) and where appropriate on GP10N(SS) forms
• prescriber signature
• date prescribed

GP IT System Prescriber User Profile

Until all nurse prescribers have been enabled with the GP IT-re-provisioning functionality (i.e., printing a prescription with a barcode) and nurses are instructed to start using GP10(SS) stationery, it is vital that prescriber user profiles are set up correctly on the GP IT system.

• If there is no code (unique 5 alpha prescriber) added for the prescriber, the prescriber code area is left blank on the printed GP10N(SS) prescription.
• If an incorrect prescriber code format, e.g., a GP prescriber code (11111) or a NMC professional registration number is added (99X9999X) this will be printed in the prescriber code area.

These prescriptions are then passed to pharmacy processing staff to add a dummy code for the NHS Board, meaning that the cost of these prescriptions cannot be allocated to your practice.

The attached flowchart highlights the process to follow to request a prescriber code or to inform Public Health Scotland of any change in circumstances. (link to flowchart) If you have any further questions, please reach out to your IM&T Facilitator, NHS Board Primary Care Contracts Team or the ePharmacy Helpdesk nss.psdhelp@nhs.scot

GP10N(SS) Nurse Prescription Guide