Patient and carer experience of obtaining regular prescribed medication for chronic disease in the English National Health Service : a qualitative study

© 2013 Wilson et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citedThe increasing burden of chronic disease is recognised globally. Within the English National Health Service, patients with chronic disease comprise of half of all consultations in primary care, and 70% of inpatient bed days. The cost of prescribing long-term medications for those with physical chronic diseases is rising and there is a drive to reduce medicine wastage and costs. While current policies in England are focused on the latter, there has been little previous research on patient experience of ordering and obtaining regular medication for their chronic disease. This paper presents findings from England of a qualitative study and survey of patients and their carers’ experiences of community and primary care based services for physical chronic diseases. Although not the primary focus of the study, the results highlighted particular issues around service delivery of repeat prescriptionsPeer reviewedFinal Published versio