Once you've received your first prescription, you may receive a call from your clinic to check how you're getting on with your medication. This call is likely to be from either a nurse, or office staff - as opposed to your prescribing specialist. Some clinics will not follow-up with patients until their next consultation or repeat is due. In some circumstances, patients have been known to need to chase their clinic regarding either a repeat or additional consultation from their second month onwards.

• To avoid gaps in your prescription, we would strongly recommend booking your follow-up appointment or requesting a repeat prescription from your clinic no later than 3 weeks after receiving your first delivery - to allow just over a week for the dispensary to receive/dispatch your next prescription. This is assuming you've elected for a monthly prescription, which is by far most common.
• Some clinics mandate a second month follow-up consultation, while others are more willing to let patients move straight to repeats dependent on their individual cases. Previous patients moving from other clinics are more likely not to require a second month consultation. You can query your clinician during your initial consultation, or query office staff by phone thereafter to see if this is a requirement for you.
• You will need to book at least quarterly consultations with your clinics between periods of repeats. One clinic has decided after the first year, this will instead become a free quarterly medical check-up phone-call as opposed to a paid consultation, though is the exception and not the norm.

Repeat Prescriptions

If you're perfectly happy with your prescription items and how they're helping to manage your conditions, you may wish to simply repeat previously prescribed medications. Some clinics have a 'repeat form' to fill out and email in, others handle repeats by phone, or on a dedicated patient portal website/app. Some clinics have repeat prescriptions handled by pharmacists, others by specialist nurses, and some via office staff whereby medical approval will be sought behind the scenes later.

While again varying by clinic, you can often change the quantities of products on repeat prescriptions. Generally, if you've been prescribed a product before a clinic will let you repeat it in the future without the need for an additional consultation. However, it's important to note clinics are unlikely to allow drastic changes to overall amounts on prescription without a formal medical consultation. As an example, taking 20g of one product, and 10g of another, then wanting to swap those amounts - would likely not be an issue. Policies seem to vary by clinic group and doctor, based upon individual patient needs.

Medical Consultations

Some clinics have online portals where you can select available dates/times for your specialist - others can be queried by either email or phone for availability. Some clinics ask for payment upfront when booking, others will issue an invoice either on the day of, or after, your appointment.

Generally speaking, you will require a paid consultation whenever changing to products you have not tried before. Some clinics will allow product changes on a repeat when a product is unavailable, however this typically will be limited to products with similar cannabinoid levels and/or terpene profile. You are required to have at least a quarterly consultation by all known clinics. Some exceptions have been noted over time whereby occasionally a patient has an extra month of repeats, though this is normally caused by human error and goes against general clinical procedure.