Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce medicine wastage in the NHS.

The Government recognises the importance of a coordinated approach to reduce medicine wastage, improve efficiencies, and lower costs for taxpayers.

NHS England leads a medicine optimisation programme to enhance patient outcomes, ensure medication is taken as intended, avoid unnecessary medicines, and reduce wastage. For example, community pharmacies offer the New Medicines Service for newly prescribed patients and the Discharge Medicines Service for those recently discharged from hospital to support adherence.

The 2021 national overprescribing review highlighted necessary practical and cultural changes to ensure appropriate patient treatment and value for money. General practices offer Structured Medicine Reviews, with pharmacists in multi-disciplinary teams optimising patient medication and preventing wastage. Additionally, electronic Repeat Dispensing allows prescribers to send repeat prescriptions as a batch to allow better management, ensuring patients only collect what they need.

Waste reduction schemes are commissioned locally, and therefore the Department does not hold data centrally on the cost of medicines waste.