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Letters to the Editor
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Medicines recycling
Code of Ethics change could help poor countries
From Mrs P. E. Bradshaw, MRPharmS
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society is now holding consultations
on a new code of ethics for pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.
On the new draft sale and supply of medicines document, comments are invited
from pharmacists, technicians and members of the public if anything needs
to be added or removed. In this document paragraph 2(e) states: “Medicines
returned to a pharmacy from a patient’s home, a nursing or residential
home must not be supplied to any other patient.”
If this paragraph 1.8 were to be reworded to allow pharmacists to give
patient-returned medicines to licensed, reputable humanitarian organisations
it would help save landfill and incineration costs and pollution and give
access to medicines to millions of the poorest people in the world.
Inter Care is a humanitarian registered charity based in Leicester that
has been recycling returned medicines for 30 years and will soon apply
to be licensed by the Environment Agency to be able legally to collect,
sort and redistribute returned medicines from any source. Inter Care selects
only medicines more than 15 months in date, in complete original packs
and on the World Health Organization essential drugs list, or the essential
drugs list of the recipient country. Regular parcels of free medicines
have been sent direct by air to more than a hundred resource-poor, non-governmental
primary health care clinics and hospitals serving over two million people
in six anglophile African countries. Each project has personnel who are
medically qualified to diagnose, prescribe and dispense. Medicines required
are listed by individual project, all of which are visited and monitored
by Inter Care.
More than a third of the world’s population, mostly rural, cannot
afford to buy, or have no access to even the most reasonably priced generic
medicines. Government spending on drugs, including vaccines, is less than £3
a year in many African countries.
Readers who agree with me should respond to the consultation by March 9,
suggesting that Paragraph 1.8 be changed along the lines I have suggested.
Pamela Bradshaw
Derby |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal