Medication requested by your midwife

Important Prescription and Care Guidelines

If you have been seen by a midwife for a urinary tract infection (UTI), the hospital should prescribe the antibiotics, not the GP. The hospital is responsible for supplying the necessary medication. Please contact your midwife to obtain your prescription.

The hospital is also responsible for providing you with the results of hospital tests and for acting upon those results. They are responsible for any queries you might have about your care with them, in the same way that GPs respond to patients’ queries about the care provided by ourselves.

There are safety implications if a requesting hospital clinician presumes that someone else will follow up on their tests. Please contact the secretary of the consultant whom you are under so that they can put your query directly to the responsible doctor. Both the BMA General Practitioners Committee and Consultants Committee agree that this practice is potentially unsafe. The responsibility for ensuring that results are acted upon rests with the person requesting the test.

Please ask your midwife if you have any concerns or need clarification regarding your care.

There are no circumstances in which a GP must prescribe urgent medications requested by the hospital. Regardless of what you may have been told at the hospital, the hospital itself is responsible for supplying any urgent medications they recommend. They must provide at least 7 days’ worth of this medication. Failure of the hospital to supply the required urgent medications represents a breach of the hospital contract. See below for further information.

We will, however, review other issues you may have, such as iron deficiency or other non-urgent concerns, during your GP appointments.

GPs do prescribe medications requested by the hospital, but these are on a routine basis and require written instructions that are sent to us in the form of typed discharge summaries, outpatient prescriptions, or clinic letters. As these are routine requests, they are processed in the normal manner and can take up to 7 working days.

We do not prescribe medications based on patient request only, without written confirmation from the hospital. This is for clinical safety reasons.

Extract from the NHS Standard Contract 2024/25:
11.10 Where a Service User [patient] has an immediate clinical need for medication to be supplied following outpatient clinic attendance, the Provider [hospital] must itself supply to the Service User an adequate quantity of that medication to last for the period required by local practice, in accordance with any requirements set out in the A, CR, MH NHS Standard Contract 2024/25 Service Conditions (Full Length) Transfer of and Discharge from Care Protocols (but at least sufficient to meet the Service User’s immediate clinical needs until the Service User’s GP receives the relevant Clinic Letter and can prescribe accordingly).