Litter officers are investigating how bottles of prescription medicines, unused syringes and packets of past-use-by-date pills have ended up in the North Island New Zealand Hutt River.

A resident who noticed the medical waste on the river bank and in the river 150 metres north of Ewen Bridge phoned Hutt City Council at about 1.45pm today. Environmental Officer Alan Pope was there within 10 minutes.

Some of the foil packs of pills and bottles of medicine were still in half a dozen supermarket bags but other waste was strewn along a 20-metre stretch.  Among the bottles was what appeared to be patient notes and prescriptions.  Labels on containers were from pharmacies all over the Hutt Valley and from the district health board’s pharmacy department.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/local-papers/hutt-news/8430920/Medical-waste-dumped-in-Hutt-River

No doubt investigation will track back the to the patient or carer involved, or to the clinic, pharmacy or family physician prescriber. Either way, it seems likely that there is plenty of information for easy investigation.

The description paints a picture of a patient dumping their own wastes – why else would it be in a number of carrier bags. containing the case notes of just one patient?

But why blame that patient? The problem surely lies in the lack of a suitable support service for domiciliary patients who receive care without the infrastructure to provide suitable waste containers and a collection service or collection points, including sufficient information to tell everyone just what is available, where it is, and how to access those services.

It’s the same the world over.