Almost 2 per cent of Wiltshire health authority's annual £53m drugs budget is being spent on medicines which are never used, the authority believes. It is now starting an education campaign for patients to reduce wastage.
Ms Jill Loader (pharmaceutical adviser, Wiltshire HA) told The Journal on March 14 that the matter of medicines wastage had been raised by the authority when the contract for disposing of the waste had changed. A health authority representative had visited Medical Waste UK Ltd, the new disposal contractor, and had been "astounded" by what she had seen. Ms Loader had also visited the company along with Mr David Roberts, the authority's communications officer, in order to take photographs. It was intended that these would be used in posters for general medical practitioners' surgeries as part of a patient education campaign. Subsequently, it had been decided to produce a video to be shown on surgery television systems.
Ms Loader said that one of the biggest problems was patients on multiple items requesting repeats of all the items on their prescription even when they had only run out of one item. There was a mistaken belief that if they did not do this then the unordered items would be deleted from the next prescription, she said.
The health authority was disposing of around 10 tonnes of prescription medicines returned from pharmacies and surgeries each year. Based on estimates by the authority and the disposal company, this waste was worth about £1m. In addition was the cost of collecting and disposing of the medicines.
Ms Loader added that as a result of a press release sent out by the authority the issue had been covered by the local press and an item had been shown on the BBC's west country news programme on February 25.