Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to reduce medicine over prescribing.

The Department keeps overprescribing under careful review and works with NHS England and the wider health system to reduce inappropriate or unnecessary prescribing. This is done through a range of system-wide work, for example:

• supporting personalised care and shared decision-making to help ensure medicines remain appropriate for a patient's clinical needs, circumstances and preferences;

• encouraging regular medicines reviews to help identify and address inappropriate prescribing and problematic polypharmacy; and

• promoting access to non-pharmacological interventions, including talking therapies and social prescribing, where these may be a more appropriate option than medicines.