Limbo
Posted: May 18th, 2019, 11:47 am
What can/should I do from here?
A few weeks ago, I tried to buy an NHS prescription prepayment. Starting at https://apps.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/ppcwebsales/patient.do , go to "buy now", and give them details page by page. A bit of arithmetic tells me that a year's payment gets me 6 instalments, ditto a second year, after which I hit 60 and apparently qualify for free prescriptions.
It then takes me to their payment processor, where after I've entered my creditcard details the system generates an error (of the kind that should be seen by developers of a system, not end-users). It offers a "cancel" link, but that just generates another error. At this point I know neither whether I've been charged nor whether my certificate is on its way.
I head off to my pharmacy (where they know me) for my regular prescription. I explain the situation and ask them what I should do, they trust me and give me it free of charge.
A few days later I still have no certificate from them, but I see my creditcard has indeed been charged £104. So I try contacting them through their contact form https://contactcentreservices.nhsbsa.nh ... ontactForm . This partially works, though the "date of birth" field prevents my entering anything!
A couple of days later I get an email reply. It's quite badly malformed, but I spot a human-written portion asking for my date of birth, to which I reply.
My reply gets returned as undelivered. With a lot of diagnostic information appropriate to a developer, not an end user. It has been in a mail loop, passed around among many servers at outlook.com - presumably the NHS's service provider for this mail. I infer that the NHS's contractor has botched their own configuration.
Evidently this NHS system is too broken to use. I'm reluctant to try the 'phone: I need to watch my blood pressure, for the same reason I need the prescriptions. I decide instead to try and draw a line under it, and raise a dispute over the creditcard payment with my bank. I can instead buy the prepayment in person at my pharmacy, and backdate it to the prescription I already have.
But my bank seem in no hurry to resolve the matter. It's now three weeks and the matter remains open. The time window for backdating a prepayment is closing. With two separate processes going nowhere, what do I now do?
A few weeks ago, I tried to buy an NHS prescription prepayment. Starting at https://apps.nhsbsa.nhs.uk/ppcwebsales/patient.do , go to "buy now", and give them details page by page. A bit of arithmetic tells me that a year's payment gets me 6 instalments, ditto a second year, after which I hit 60 and apparently qualify for free prescriptions.
It then takes me to their payment processor, where after I've entered my creditcard details the system generates an error (of the kind that should be seen by developers of a system, not end-users). It offers a "cancel" link, but that just generates another error. At this point I know neither whether I've been charged nor whether my certificate is on its way.
I head off to my pharmacy (where they know me) for my regular prescription. I explain the situation and ask them what I should do, they trust me and give me it free of charge.
A few days later I still have no certificate from them, but I see my creditcard has indeed been charged £104. So I try contacting them through their contact form https://contactcentreservices.nhsbsa.nh ... ontactForm . This partially works, though the "date of birth" field prevents my entering anything!
A couple of days later I get an email reply. It's quite badly malformed, but I spot a human-written portion asking for my date of birth, to which I reply.
My reply gets returned as undelivered. With a lot of diagnostic information appropriate to a developer, not an end user. It has been in a mail loop, passed around among many servers at outlook.com - presumably the NHS's service provider for this mail. I infer that the NHS's contractor has botched their own configuration.
Evidently this NHS system is too broken to use. I'm reluctant to try the 'phone: I need to watch my blood pressure, for the same reason I need the prescriptions. I decide instead to try and draw a line under it, and raise a dispute over the creditcard payment with my bank. I can instead buy the prepayment in person at my pharmacy, and backdate it to the prescription I already have.
But my bank seem in no hurry to resolve the matter. It's now three weeks and the matter remains open. The time window for backdating a prepayment is closing. With two separate processes going nowhere, what do I now do?