February 2026 Prescribing Update Supply Restriction

As part of the prescribing update, we’ve made some minor changes regarding supply restriction. There are several related issues that we need to consider / address:

• Different practice approaches aren’t consistently applied – principally, can admin staff do this?
• Need to manage patients who have long term restricted supply – have made progress on developing this
• Need to factor in new pathway for essential med reviews with supply restriction if non-attendance
• Need to consider what to do if patient hasn’t been invited / warned recently – not consistent currently and has raised issues. Also means protocols fall down if recall not embedded or behind on invites. Suggest sending invite with warning first if not done recently.
• What to do when task sent to clinician/pharmacist – how do they see what the reasons are? How do they document outcome? Needs to be…
  • Easy to access (e.g. status alert)
  • Clear re situation and what to record
  • Easy to record the outcome so system knows what has been selected
  • Suggest new template to display info and allow recording of outcomes. Probably similar to Stop recall in some ways
• Need to manage how supply is put back to normal once patient has had monitoring / med review / AR

Attached is a proposed flow for how I think this could work. Unfortunately, this means more dev work and continuing to extend part of this prescribing update, but I think its necessary to get everything working properly here. It’s a key part of the system and not sufficiently clear currently. For discussion on Thu.