Veterinary Prescriptions

Veterinary Surgeons should provide a written prescription for horse owners on request unless medicines are not suitable for the treatment of a specific condition such as: 

• medicines that can only be administered by intravenous injection
• medicines that need to be imported using the VMD import scheme
• special veterinary medicines that can only be provided to veterinary surgeons
• medicines for immediate use of for treatment of inpatients
  
  

When prescribing the animal should be 'under your care', having undergone an examination for the assessment of the condition being treated, although repeat prescriptions can be provided without examination on each occasion. The RCVS expect you to set a policy for the frequency of examination needed for ongoing treatment and make clients aware of this policy.

We have provided a prescription form and a no-antibiotic prescription available to all vets to use to ensure you are complying with all of the requirements of current legislation. These forms follow our best practice for prescribing medicines.

Prescription fraud

Prescription fraud may occur with veterinary prescriptions. In order to limit the possibility that a prescription has been amended we recommend the following steps are taken (as a minimum):

1. That prescriptions are only accepted when they are written on tamper evidence documents such as the BEVA prescription form; when the BEVA prescription form is used this has been watermarked with the BEVA logo and the words 'British Equine Veterinary Association'. If no watermark is present then your should assume that the document has been changed. 
2. That you confirm the identity of the prescriber using the RCVS register to confirm that a valid registration number has been included (here)
3. That you confirmed the prescription with the prescriber by telephone by calling the telephone number shown on the practice website. Do not assume that a phone number or email provided on this form is correct and unamended.