Pills, a purple cat called Mister Soft, turquoise scooters and turkeys

Below is a guest blog by Simon Priestley, from NHS Creative, about how the latest 'Meet Mo' film was developed.

Could this mean the return of our favourite character with the big round yellow head? If you hadn’t already guessed – Mo is back!

The third movie in the Mo series was created for Wessex Academic Health Science Network, and launched on 27 September.

If you’ve been following the Mo saga, you’ll know that Mo is one of those people who relies on several prescriptions to stay well. Mo has been confused, ill, driven away by emergency ambulance (twice), had two stays in hospital and been given even more medicines to manage. Despite all this, Mo still manages to keep a beautiful garden, cope with a very weird purple cat, a neurotic goldfish and run a classic Italian scooter.

In fact, as the phrase goes on every Mo movie to date: “Mo is just like the rest of us … generally getting on with life."

Indeed, Mo is getting on with life. Mo might need medicines to stay well but never allows them to get in the way of the fun stuff like sharing a bowl of spaghetti with Mister Soft at a favourite Italian bistro, racing along country lanes on the treasured mint green scooter and cooking a giant turkey at Christmas.

With a busy life like this, Mo needs an easier way to keep track of, and to get hold of all these medicines every month.

This is where the NHS Electronic Repeat Dispensing Service comes in. We see Mo (never without Mister Soft!) racing from home to the surgery, queueing, driving to the pharmacist, collecting parking tickets and then racing home again where potential confusion reigns (again) with various medicines running out, or getting overstocked. Mister Soft gets left out in the rain – and if you look carefully, you’ll even see him hurtling out of control aboard Mo’s scooter. Not good!

Electronic Repeat Dispensing helps patients, pharmacists and GP’s where doctors send up to a year’s worth of repeat prescriptions to a patient’s pharmacy all in one go. All the patient then needs to do is contact the pharmacy to make sure all is ready, and then pick up what they need each month with no hassle.

It’s a fairly simple concept that works well. All that is needed is a simple and reasonably entertaining way of getting this across to those who’ll benefit from it. Who better to do this than our hero? Mo has far better things to be getting on with, not least making sure the rubber ring still fits for the summer holiday, and, later on in the year, fitting that giant turkey in the oven.

Mo might have an unfeasibly large yellow head and only ever wears a white baby grow, but other than that, there are many of us who could be in similar situations.

After all, we’re all just generally getting on with life, aren’t we?

Mo's Medicines - Electronic Repeat Dispensing from Wessex AHSN Limited on Vimeo.