On February 1, the maximum prescription length will increase from three to 12 months.
At the moment, prescriptions for most medicines are limited to a maximum duration of three months, which means people who have stable, long-term conditions need to regularly see their prescriber to continue accessing necessary medicines.
But Dunedin GP Jenny Macdiarmid said it was not a "one-size-fits-all" approach.
Patients and clinicians needed to be realistic about the changes.
"A lot of patients might expect that they should, by right, move to 12-monthly scripts, whereas an actual fact of it is that the prescriber has to decide whether that would be appropriate or not."
Examples where a 12-month script might not be appropriate would be if a patient was on multiple medications with different interactions and each one had different risks, she said.
"So for example, if you’ve just started someone on medication, and you want to get them back to check that it’s doing what it’s supposed to be doing, that there’s no side effects and it’s certainly the correct dose and so on.
"We kind of do have a medical legal duty to check if the side effects are potentially significant or serious, and to check that they’re not happening."
Dr Macdiarmid, who also works as a WellSouth clinical adviser, was worried patients might just request a script or repeat a script and expect it to be 12 months.
"I doubt many practitioners would be happy to do a repeat script straight off at 12 months without having a consult for us to decide if that’s appropriate."
She also expressed concern some patients might "hoard" their medical concerns until their annual checkup.
"If the doctor or primary care practitioner is only seeing them in 12 months and having to review their medication and make sure that it’s still safe to prescribe and that it’s appropriate, that consult really has to be purely about that."
Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora has been approached for comment.
