If the NHS refuses to trust private practitioners enough to switch prescriptions over, why do they allow private practice at all?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/04/nhs-refuses-to-prescribe-adhd-drugs-to-private-patients/
Something that I find incredibly irritating to hear about how the NHS is reluctant to accept shared care/take over prescribing for private diagnoses and by extension: refusing to acknowledge the validity of private practice altogether frankly.
I don't get it. No other country does this with national health systems, norway for instance allows you to pursue private healthcare if you can afford to skip the line and then allow you to switch your prescriptions over to the public system.
It incentivizes those who have the money to avoid taking up spots on a waiting list without a serious lifelong economic burden when their taxes are contributing to a health system that is supposed to be helping them with this condition.
They do this because they trust their guidelines, oversight procedures and laws to ensure these private diagnoses aren't abused. I would imagine any health system that wants to allow private practice would have this point in place to a good standard (which I think the NHS does, to be fair!)
I guess as a tl:dr.. My question pretty much is this: If you can't trust the prescriptions to be "proper" enough for them to be moved onto the NHS system, how can you trust private diagnoses at all? If you don't, how can you allow THEM to prescribe?