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Patients should have more say about their medication

Posted By handy413

"Patients should have more say about their medication"

About: Guernsey House / Primary care addiction service Sheffield (PCASS)

(as a service user),

What is needed is "drug of choice" prescribing, you know it works.

I think things have changed for the worse at Guernsey House over the past couple of years, instead of moving forward things seem to be moving backwards, less say or anything the patient wants, more what the doctors says goes.

There seem to be less and less grace, I hope one day there will be drug of choice prescribing practices which I believe have already been scientifically proven.

I hope patients have more say about the medication they are receiving, especially the experienced ones.

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Responses

Response from Primary Care Addiction Service Sheffield 12 years ago
Primary Care Addiction Service Sheffield

Submitted on 07/02/2012 at 16:26
Published on Care Opinion at 16:41

Dear Handy 413,

Thank you for the taking the time and effort to post your views on our service.

I am sorry that you do not feel you are receiving a service that meets your expectations. We take patient's opinions very seriously and this is one of the reasons we invite patients to comment freely regarding the service using Patient Opinion. We do read and respond to each view which helps us to continually adapt our service.

We always endeavour to follow national, evidenced -based best practice and guidelines and have a strong clinical governance framework within which we work to ensure this happens.

We are aware treatment needs to be tailored to an individual patient's needs and that no one treatment or management plan will work for everybody. We try to be flexible and offer a range of options to patients as well as at times challenging patient perceptions or beliefs that may prevent individuals from moving forward in treatment or mean they continue to rely on less evidenced based medications such as long term benzodiazepines.

It is certainly true that in recent times there has been a national shift in expected outcomes for patients in substance misuse services including far more emphasis being placed on helping patients to 'recover' and that services must continue to adapt their provision to try to ensure patients are helped to access the necessary resources to enable them to have the best outcome possible for them.

Please continue to be open and honest about what your needs are with your prescriber. It may also be helpful to access further keyworking in order to spend more time looking at this and identifying the key factors which will assist your recovery.

Dr Gaynor Radley

Clinical Director

Primary Care Addiction Service Sheffield

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