Submit and retrieve prescriptions
Published on 14 February 2025
Submit and retrieve prescriptions
Find information on prescription submissions, as well as retrieving copies of your submitted prescriptions.
All submissions must be dispatched to our scanning centre at the following address:
Practitioner Services Divisions Scanning Centre, NHS National Services Scotland, Gyle Square, 1 South Gyle Crescent, Edinburgh, EH12 9EB.
As per our existing procedure, forms must be submitted by the fifth calendar day of each month, or other agreed CPS courier collection dates. If these dates fall on a weekend or a public holiday, the deadline moves to the next working day. We cannot guarantee that late submissions will be processed within the same month’s batch of prescriptions, and this could cause a delay or non-fulfilment and reduction in your expected payment. Late submissions that cannot be processed will be carried over to the following month’s scanning and batch processing, along with new submissions. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to submit your prescriptions on time to avoid payment delays.
CPS courier collection dates can be found here: Courier Service | Community Pharmacy Scotland
Submission Quality
The Scanning Service at PSD receives around 6 to 6.5 million prescriptions each month. Given the volume of submissions, even a small percentage of prescriptions submitted with staples, paper clips, tape, stickers, tears, patient notes etc. can mean significant delays to the scanning process. GP Practices are also being reminded to take action at source to prevent some of these issues from occurring and advising them of the guidance being provided to you so that any requests for re-prints do not come as a surprise to them and they understand the rationale.
1. Faint Ink
On receipt of a prescription that has faint ink and is not fully legible, please ask for a re-print as the paper prescription is still the trigger for payment and scanning is required to merge the paper prescription with the electronic claim. If not, the prescription is sent for re-scan or keyed manually from paper and this has an impact on the timeliness of your payment.
2. Red Ink
Please ask any prescriber for a re-print if there is red ink, printed or written, within a prescription as this is not registered by scanning software and has to be sent for re-scan or keyed manually from paper. This impacts the timeliness of your payment.
3. Patient Notes part of the prescription form
In some instances, the patient notes part of the prescription form has been folded over and not detached from the prescription itself. PSD does not require the repeat part of the prescription form and requests that these are removed and do not form part of the prescription submission. The impact of this is that if the notes page is not removed and folded over, when these are scanned, we may not capture an image of the rear side of the prescription with a patient signature for Scheule 2 & 3 controlled drugs, which is a mandatory requirement as per circular pca2022-p-27.pdf and required for NHS Board Controlled Drug Accountable Officers.
4. Best practice for prescription submissions
To support timely and accurate payments by reducing the amount of additional work we need to do to process your submissions, there are certain best practices to adhere to when it comes to prescription submission.
They include:
• The use of staples, sticky labels, paper clips, sticky notes, or tape in your prescriptions may obscure necessary information and can damage or jam the scanners, so please ensure these are removed from your prescriptions to avoid delays to your payments.
• Ensure that all patient notes are neatly detached and do not include these in the submission bundle.
• Please request a reprint if the prescription has not printed clearly and/or it contains red ink.
• Ensure your pharmacy details are clearly printed or stamped in the top right-hand side of all prescriptions.
• Check that prescriptions are all facing the same way.
• Please do not submit loose bundles of prescriptions. Tightly and carefully secure prescriptions in grab sized bundles with elastic bands. Then the smaller bundles should be secured together with a larger elastic band before placing in transit bags or boxes. Please try to avoid curling the edges of the prescriptions when bundling as these will need to be individually cut off before scanning to avoid jamming the scanners.
• Keep GP10A stock order forms, invoices and PC70s etc in separate bundles.
• Ensure you include your fully completed GP34 Declaration form and all the prescriptions you have declared on your GP34 in the submission. The GP34 forms and items figures should not include electronic only claim counts.
For Community Pharmacy Scotland Members:
• Do not include too many prescriptions in one bag. The maximum is 6000. Please split submissions over 6000 in to more than one bag. (If you need more bags, please contact Community Pharmacy Scotland on 0131 467 7766) If you are submitting more than 2 bags, please include a note to advise whether this is part 1 of 2, part 2 of 2 etc. If you forget you can always write this information on the front of the courier bag.
• Ensure you take a note of the package tracking numbers on collection. If you are using more than 1 bag for your collection, please copy the details from both bag labels. This is very important if we need to track your prescriptions.
A training video on how to improve the pharmacy claiming and payment process is available.
Should you have any further enquiries, please contact the PSD Scanning Centre on 01506 705125 or email: nss.p-cfs-scanningservices@nhs.scot
Pharmacy Processing and Payments – Guidance to Practitioners
We have a series of short videos to support Pharmacy claiming and processing in the new Data Capture Validation & Pricing (nDCVP) system in Scotland. By working together, NSS and Pharmacy staff can achieve efficient and accurate payment processing. We appreciate and value your support. These videos contain vital guidance and information for practitioners encouraging best practice.
Retrieve a copy of a submitted prescription
Practitioner Services are happy to provide dispensing contractors with a scanned copy of prescriptions submitted for processing.
To obtain a copy of a scanned prescription, please contact 01506 705101 for a retrieval request form.