Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will ask NHS England to monitor the (a) uptake of locally implemented waste reduction schemes and (b) impact of such schemes on levels of unused medicines.

NHS England is leading a programme on medicine optimisation which aims to help patients to improve outcomes and safety, take medicines as intended, avoid taking unnecessary medicines, and reduce wastage. 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 pharmacists are part of multi-disciplinary teams to review patients’ medication, optimise their 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.

The national overprescribing review from 2021 set outs a series of practical and cultural changes necessary to ensure patients receive the most appropriate treatment for their needs, while ensuring value for money. The impact of these and other measures is not centrally monitored.