Exploration of medicines waste management services in the United Kingdom

Although being at the core of patients’ treatment, an estimated £300m of NHS prescribed medicines are wasted annually, and medicines are increasingly being considered as emerging environmental hazards due to inappropriate management and pollution associated with their use. Medicines management is a complex issue, defined as “the entire way medicines are selected, procured, delivered, prescribed, administered, and reviewed to optimise the contribution that medicines make to producing informed and desired outcomes of patient care”. Hence, it is imperative to develop broad and wide-ranging medicines management methods to reduce waste and prevent environmental pollution, enable sustainability, improve patients’ health and wellbeing, and reduce cost. However, there is currently limited research in this area.
The principal aim of this study is to perform a pilot exploration of effective waste management methods and/or services in order to understand the drivers of wastage in medicines management processes, and to identify touchpoints in the service to be redesigned, within the UK.