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Letters to the Editor
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Medicines recycling
Medicines waste is offensive
From Miss D. P. Browne, MRPharmS
Is it possible to distinguish between a “no returns from patients” and
a “no recycling” policy
for medicines (PJ, 3 March,
p249)?
What concerns me is the amount of wastage from pharmacies. Where I work,
medicines left over from filling a monitored dosage system are disposed
of, even if only seven of 28 doses have been used.
Occasionally a patient walks out of the building, returns immediately and
hands back a medicine saying that he no longer takes it; this medicine
is then thrown out on the grounds that it left the pharmacy. Try as I might,
I cannot think how this medicine could have been tampered with in a manner
that is not obvious.
There are few Shipmans fortunately, but there are millions of people in
less well-off countries who are suffering from treatable diseases and yet
cannot obtain medicines. Is it beyond our capabilities to come to a solution
whereby our “excess” can meet the needs of those without?
It is not currently deemed an offence to throw out usable, good quality,
in-date medicines. However, I think that it should be viewed as both socially
and ecologically offensive.
Dorothy Browne
Barnsley, South Yorkshire |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal