Yesterday, the CCG governing bodies for Barking and Dagenham, Havering and Redbridge agreed to stop funding or restrict access to a number of treatments, medicines and procedures as they look to make further savings for the local NHS.
The decisions come after an eight week public consultation, ‘Spending NHS money wisely 2’ that looked at saving the NHS around £3.75 million. Over 760 responses were received.
The governing bodies agreed to stop prescribing over the counter sleeping tablets, sunscreens, anti-malarial medicines and certain “non-essential” procedures, as well as restricting who is eligible for cataract surgery and podiatry.
A full breakdown of the proposals and what treatments, medicines and procedures will no longer be funded is now available on our CCG website.
There is no action for you at this stage. We will begin to introduce these changes from Monday 1 January 2018.
Before then, all GPs and PMs will receive a suite of support materials – as you did for Phase 1 in June of this year - that will help explain the changes to affected patients.
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