Hardly a day goes by where you don’t hear a story of a new pill or injection that has prolonged a life or provided a cure to a problem. Then the initial excitement is extinguished by the fact that this medicine will not be available on the NHS due to cost.
We would all like to think that the NHS could and would prescribe the most proven and effective medicines for whatever diagnosis might befall us. However, the grim reality is that medical inflation is hitting hard. This includes research and development which all contributes to the cost of producing new drugs.
The Patient Participation Group (PPG) felt it would be useful to raise awareness of this problem and to attempt to reduce the amount of medicine that is wasted. This was done by holding three medicines amnesties where all the patients who receive their medicines from the pharmacy at Ivy Court were asked to bring back any that hadn’t been used. Our amnesties were held in July 2024, Nov 2024 and Nov 2025.
In the first amnesty we received £2,500 pounds worth of unwanted/unused medicines. In the second we received half the volume of drugs but their value was £6,469 pounds. In our final amnesty in November 2025 the value of drugs returned unused was £868, after we removed a single prescription worth £2,642 which skewed the result.
Interestingly, the summer amnesty returned many more high value drugs (injectables among others) and anti-depressants and in the winter, more analgesics and antibiotics. The high-value item in the third amnesty consisted of diabetes-related drugs. The oldest drugs returned were issued in 1998!
The jump from two and a half thousand pounds to nearly six and a half thousand pounds in eight short months was a real wake-up call to us all to be careful about how we order our repeat prescriptions and to resist the temptation to tick all “just in case”.
The significant reduction of returns in terms of volume and value by November 2025 gives us hope. We believe that the changes in how patients can order repeat medicines as well as greater awareness of costs and wastage are leading patients to make better choices.
Please Note: We know that not all of our patients have their drugs dispensed at the Surgery. You may get your medicines from Boots or Paydens in Tenterden or other pharmacies locally. If you have any unused or out of date drugs then you can take them back to the pharmacy that you got them from. They will be happy to dispose of them safely.
We will be holding another Medicines Amnesty in November 2026. Let’s see if we can keep our wastage down. Watch out for news via the screens in Reception and on the PPG area of the Ivy Court Surgery website.
Contribution by Fiona Edwards – PPG Chair
