Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that surplus prescribed medication is recycled.

NHS England is leading a programme on medicines optimisation which aims to help patients to improve outcomes and safety, take medicines as intended, avoid taking unnecessary medicines and reduce wastage. For example, Regional Medicines Optimisation Committees were established in 2016 to support and optimise local prescribing practice and reduce unwarranted variation. Community pharmacies also offer the New Medicines Service, providing further support to patients newly prescribed certain medicines, and the Discharge Medicines Service, enabling hospitals to refer recently discharged patients to a community pharmacy for support with new medication.

Structured Medicine Reviews are offered by general practices (GPs) where increasingly pharmacists are part of multi-disciplinary teams to review patients’ medication, optimise medication and prevent wastage. In addition, electronic Repeat Dispensing (eRD) allows a GP to send repeat prescriptions to a patient’s pharmacy to manage the dispensing of the specific medicines required. As part of the eRD service, the pharmacy is required to make sure that the patient still needs all of their medicines and dispense to the patients only those that are needed.

In September 2021, the findings and recommendations of the national overprescribing review were published, setting out a series of practical and cultural changes necessary to ensure patients receive the most appropriate treatment for their needs while ensuring value for money.

All pharmacies must by law accept unwanted medicines from patients for disposal. However, the Department does not promote the reuse of medicines returned from patients. Where medicines have left a pharmacy, it is not possible to assure the quality of returned medicines on physical inspection alone. When medicines are returned from patients’ homes, there is no way of guaranteeing that the medicines have been stored or handled appropriately. This could affect patient safety. Therefore, no estimate of the potential savings of repurposing unused prescribed medication has been made.