Chipping Norton Health Centre is a dispensing doctors practice. This means we are in a unique position in that we not only provide a GP service to our patients but also dispense both acute and repeat medications via our in-house dispensary to roughly five thousand patients.
Some of our patients will remember the dispensaries within White House and West Street surgeries. When the surgeries merged and relocated to this new building in 2015, a pharmacy license was acquired. Until now the pharmacy and dispensary have been operating as a hybrid model, and our patients haven’t needed to know whether their medications have been provided by the pharmacy or the dispensary. For various reasons, it has now become necessary to split the two to improve the operations of both. From 1st April, the dispensary will cease to operate from within the Pharmacy and will be located next to the reception area inside the main CNHC building.
The new dispensary will be open Monday to Friday from 08:30 to 18:00. We are currently looking at the possibility of Installing an automated prescription collection system that will allow you to pick up your medicines at your convenience. This means you will no longer have to wait in a queue or make a wasted journey to the Surgery to check if your medicines are ready. For those of you who have medicines delivered, this will continue as arranged.
Benefits of being a Dispensary patient:
Every time dispensing patients use the dispensary; they make a vital contribution to the local economy. The NHS prescription charge is a contribution to the NHS; it is not a payment to the surgery, or its dispensary and it is not related to the cost of your medicine(s). However, dispensing income helps to pay for:
- longer consultations for those patients required
- free dosette boxes
- jobs for your dispensing team
- extra staff
We aim to offer a high standard of dispensing services, and all our dispensers are fully qualified. Our GPs and clinical pharmacists supervise the service, and we ensure that only the highest quality medicines are dispensed.
To be a dispensary patient you must live more than one mile or 1.6km, as the crow flies, from the nearest pharmacy. If you are eligible and wish to use our dispensary services, you will need to register. Patients with serious difficulty in using the local pharmacy because of distance or inadequate means of communication, and do not qualify under the distance rule but want to use the service, are able to apply to NHS England under the serious difficulty rule. Your request will be considered and could be granted but there may be exceptions. Applications will need to be made via a form which will be available from the dispensary. If you are already on our dispensing list you do not need to take any action.
One very important thing to note is that current legislation does not allow you to register as a dispensary patient and also use a pharmacy service. You need to do one or the other.
If you have any further queries or need additional information about Chipping Norton Health Centres Dispensary, please do not hesitate to contact our dispensary manager at:
bobicb-ox.cnhcdispensary@nhs.net
They will be more than happy to assist you with any questions.
Chipping Norton Pharmacy
Chipping Norton Pharmacy operates from a purpose-built space within Chipping Norton Health Centre and will continue to do so. If you are a pharmacy patient, there should be no changes to the way in which your prescription is dispensed. You may notice some subtle changes within the pharmacy but it will not impact on the service you receive.