Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the annual cost to the NHS of mandating the disposal of all unused returned drugs; and what assessment his Department has made of the feasibility of the NHS re-prescribing unused returned drugs instead.

The NHS had since taken a range of further measures to further optimise the use of medicines and reduce wastage.

Medicines cannot normally be reused as the quality of returned medicines cannot be assessed on physical inspection alone. The World Health Organization’s guidelines state that if the quality of an item is unacceptable in the donor country, it is also unacceptable as a donation. Moreover, there are patent issues involved in donating medicines to other countries.