Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:08 pm on 15 May 2018.
First Minister, a constituent, Mr Robert Jones, has recently informed me that he can no longer collect his prescription from the pharmacy within the building of his GP practice because of dispensing rules that have changed as a result of being brought in following the National Health Service (Pharmaceutical Services) (Wales) Regulations 2013, in spite of the fact that he has been registered at the practice for the whole of his life. It's clearly common sense, as far as I can see, for him to be able to collect his prescription from within the building where he was given the prescription, so I do find the policy difficult to comprehend when the constituent is already at their GP practice. Can you commit to looking again at this issue to see whether there is sufficient flexibility within the system—from the correspondence I've received back from the health Minister that doesn't seem to be the case—so that these regulations do not have these kinds of unintended consequences?