New campaign to tackle medicine wastage

New campaign to tackle medicine wastage

The safe use of medicines and reducing medicines waste are important issues for the NHS.

As part of NHS Lanarkshire’s Prescribing Quality and Efficiency Programme (PQEP), a campaign will be launched soon to promote “a call to action” to reduce waste and improve safety.

Kate Bell, head of service change and transformation, PQEP Programme Director acknowledges the value of reducing medicines waste. She states: “The overall objective of the programme and thus this campaign is to improve the quality of prescribing by promoting the safe, effective and efficient use of medicines by staff and the public.

As part of the campaign Lanarkshire pharmacists and GPs will be distributing information leaflets which people can use to cancel and return any medicines they no longer require.

The key messages from the campaign are:

‘Only tick it if you take it’ – only order medicines you need

‘Look before you leave’ – As medicines cannot be replaced into stock for re-use once taken outside the pharmacy, we will encourage the public to check the prescription bag before leaving the pharmacy. This way people can hand items back that they may not require on this occasion – they can always get it next time – and the medicine can be put back into stock.

‘Prescribing pledge’ – everyone has a responsibility for medicines; prescribers, pharmacist and patients

Dr Iain Wallace, medical director, comments “A large source of medicines waste comes from repeat prescriptions.  We want to encourage people to order only what they need and use and not to build up stocks of medicines at home. That is why it is very important to ‘only tick it if you need it’ when ordering repeat prescriptions. .

“We can all play our part in reducing the waste of medicine to help NHS Lanarkshire continue to improve our healthcare services.”

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