Prescriptions

Renewing a Prescription

If you are on long term medication that has been prescribed by one of the doctors at the International Health Centre, we are pleased to offer an online renewal facility for repeat prescriptions. Currently we offer this as a free service to our registered patients, however in order for us to manage this and due to the high volume of requests we receive daily, we please ask that you only send in one request per month where possible. We only want to receive one request per person and we ask that you put the first item in as normal and any further items in the comments box.

If you have been prescribed medication by a specialist, and have not yet had chance to come and see one of our doctors to update your notes, please put this in the comments box, and we will do our best to facilitate, however we cannot guarantee that the doctor will dispense medication not on our records without seeing you first to discuss.

We understand that patients on long term medication may not feel the need to be seen every six months, and we try to be flexible on this, however if the doctor instructs the reception staff that you will need to be seen, they will contact you to make an appointment. In some cases the doctor will dispense a box of medication in the interim until you make your appointment. Long term medication provides control or prevention; however prolonged use can, if left unchecked, have an effect on other parts of the body. Therefore our doctors will ask you to come in for a blood test or a consultation to check on your chronic condition at intervals they feel is best to manage your condition.

Please ensure that you have at least a week’s supply of medication when ordering. It normally takes 3 days for the prescription to be issued, not counting weekends or public holidays. If you need medication urgently, we ask that you book an appointment to see the doctor as we cannot guarantee prescriptions will be done earlier than 72 hours from receipt of the request.

Receiving a Prescription

There are several ways to receive your prescription.

If you have a Utente Number and a Portuguese mobile phone number, you will receive the prescription by SMS (text message). You do not have to do anything with the message and just show it to the pharmacist who will dispense the medication for you. The system is designed to be paperless going forward and we will no longer provide a paper version of the prescription if you have the Utente number and a Portuguese mobile number. If you have the SNS 24 App, and wish to see the prescription you just click on the link in the text message, this takes you to the SNS 24 App and you log in to your personal SNS 24 and can see all the prescriptions issued by us and other health professionals using this service. Our prescription service automatically defaults to sending the SMS message, so printing them off has now stopped. We are no longer able to email these to you.

If you do not have a Portuguese mobile number, you will need to come in and collect the prescription from reception. We are no longer able to email these to you.

If you do not have a Utente number, and using a European Health Card, these prescriptions cannot be sent by text message, as the National Health Prescription service does not allow for this. You would have to come and collect from the clinic. We are no longer able to email these to you.

To order your medication, please use the form below. All fields need to be completed and if you feel we need to know anything further please put in the comments box.