Dental urgent supply SOP for community pharmacies

Please see the attached Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) below for pharmacies with respect to dealing with requests for urgent supply of medicines from dentists who are triaging patients remotely during the lockdown period.

Dentist triage service

Any patients who are considered to be in urgent need of treatment will be directed to a “hub” for urgent treatment. Other patients which are not considered to be urgent as above are likely to be treated with antibiotics and analgesia. As dentists will be working remotely, patients will not be able to be given a prescription (either NHS FP10D or private) to take to the pharmacy, and equally most pharmacies would have concerns about the safety of receiving prescriptions in this way. Instead dentists will email the pharmacy for the urgent supply of prescription medicines at the request of the prescriber. The email will be sent to the pharmacy via the NHSmail shared account, and the actual hard copy prescription will be posted by first class post, hopefully to arrive within the 72 hours required.

• Patients should have been advised to inform you that a 'prescription' has been emailed to you, and that they may have to wait if the pharmacy is busy. Dentists may also try and phone and let you know they have sent a request by email. The request will be generated by the dental DERs/REGO system, and the format may be different to the standard NHS prescription, however all relevant information will be included.
• The dentist has been advised to include an email address with the hardcopy prescription which could be used by the pharmacy to confirm receipt of the prescription (this is considered as best practice and is not a contractual requirement and would allow the dentist to “close the loop”)
• The attached SOP below outlines the process for your information.

Urgent Supply of medication - Dental SOP Final (COVID-19)

Dental Hubs

Patients who are advised to attend one of the dental hubs for urgent treatment may also need medication to be prescribed, however the hubs will be using a laptop which has “Adastra” loaded which means that the prescriber can send prescriptions via EPS route.