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 medication wastage.

Medicine wastage can be reduced by ensuring that medicines are not overprescribed and those that are prescribed are taken as intended, resulting in the best outcomes for patients.

Overprescribing can be addressed by taking a shared decision-making approach and optimising a person's medicines, ensuring that patients are prescribed the right medicines, at the right time, in the right doses. The National Health Service is driving changes in this area by:

• improving the repeat prescription processes, as this will reduce the oversupply of medicines which contributes to waste;
• implementing the National Medicines Optimisation Opportunities for integrated care boards, with further information available at the following link: https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/national-medicines-optimisation-opportunities-2023-24/;
• addressing problematic polypharmacy; and
• delivering Structured Medication Reviews, with further information available at the following link: https://www.england.nhs.uk/primary-care/pharmacy/smr/.

In addition, the New Medicines Service in Community Pharmacy supports patients with newly prescribed medication for long term conditions in understanding how to take the medication effectively, and improves adherence and health gains.