Patients have been urged to stop stockpiling prescription drugs after the NHS revealed upwards of 250 tonnes of prescription pills have been wasted.

A new campaign has been launched to reduce the amount of medical waste in Wales. With the goal of saving £50m of NHS money, the campaign will seek to urge patients to order the correct amounts of medicine and not request more until a first round of pills is finished.

The government-sponsored drive, which follows a scheme that was piloted in west Wales, will be backed by local medics and include adverts on the radio as well as leaflets placed at GP pharmacies and surgeries. Chief Medical Officer for Wales, Dr Tony Jewell along with the NHS Chief Executive Paul Williams, will partner to write health professionals asking them to only prescribe necessary amounts of medication to cut down on waste.

http://www.recycle.co.uk/news/2627000.html

RecycleNow will take heart from a campaign such as this, though of course it barely addresses root causes and fails to get to grips with the real impact of the problem.

Placing the onus on patients – actually all of us, since if the job is to be done properly it is appropriate to deal also with non-prescription drug waste also – is not right, though they have their part to play.

GPs must reduce or stop unnecessary prescribing.

To go further, lean prescribing gives to patients only the amount of drug that is absolutely necessary. Often a 10-day course of tablets can be substituted with a 5- or 5-day course without any detriment to the patient. Manufacturers’ of non-prescription products must do likewise, with smaller pack sizes.

The whole thing becomes hopeless unless there is some suitable method for disposal, which is presently lacking. It is not acceptable to castigate patients for hoarding unwanted medicines if the only real disposal options are the domestic waste sack or the toilet, neither wof which are suitable disposal options.

Many high street pharmacies will accept unwanted POMs but will have to bear the cost for disposal. If communities are encouraged to dispose of drug waste by this route, pharmacies will face real cost issues that will soon become unsustaianable. What happens then? No doubt the PCTs, RecycleNow, EA and the Local Authorities will then take a back seat and suggest someone else should pay, with nobody actually accepting responsibility. So down the toilet go all that drug waste and we are rapidly back at square one.

We have discussed previously on the Clinical Waste Discussion Forum the American idea of community-wide collections of hazardous wastes, free to users, accepting all sorts of pharmaceutical wastes, hazardous household and garden chemicals and other ‘difficult’ wastes. Most seem to operate quarterly of 6-monthly, and provide just a 2 or 3 hour collection point at some convenient location, to collect those wastes that might not be taken to an amenity site, but for which there is no doorstep collection. Without this, wastes would be stockpiled at home with all of the attendent risks, or inappropriately enter the domestic waste stream.

If RecycleNow and others are serous about the disposal of drug waste, then the problem must be dealt with as a whole . That is a complex issue, as noted above, though there are practical solutions that operate well in some countries.

But of course there is always one remaining problem. What do we do about those pharmaceuticals that are not stockpiled, but which are taken by patients in line with their prescription? At present, they pee out 95-98% of the drug and its metabolites into a sewerage system that does not deal with drug residues.