John Ford discusses the process of repeat prescription before computers with Sharon Messenger.

The wider team 

What they did do, one of the receptionists had to write out, by hand, all the repeat prescriptions.  People would come to the desk or ring up, and say, ‘Can I have another repeat prescription?’ and she would spend the morning writing these things out so that by the time we came either – some were ready at coffee time and some at the end of the morning, and she would have written a sheaf of these things out – which we barely looked at, to our shame – and scribbled things on the end of them.  But this poor receptionist had to spend the morning looking up notes, in the Lloyd George envelope notes, writing them out, and then putting them in our boxes, so, before we went out for lunch, at lunchtime,  you would pick up two lists, one of these prescriptions which you had to sign, which you had to do there, and another receptionist would write up a noticeboard of the visits we had to do, under each person’s name – so if there were four doctors there were four bits of paper, and the name and address, which is why they would know where we had gone during the day, to visit these people. [So there’s a huge amount of background administration going on?] It was very pen and quill kind of time, really, it was before computers or anything like that.