Only Order What You Need

Did you know?

Even if you never open them, once you leave a pharmacy your medicines can not be recycled or used by anyone else. This means that any you return have to be destroyed.

Before ordering your medication, take a look in your medicine cabinet to see what you actually need. You may have ordered extra of a repeat prescription last time you went and forgot.

Unused medicines cost the NHS around £300 million every year, with an estimated £110 million worth of medicine returned to pharmacies, £90 million worth of unused prescriptions being stored in homes and £50 million worth of medicines disposed of by Care Homes.

Sometimes patients receive medicines they don't actually use, or use only occasionally. This means that they can lose out on the intended health benefits of their prescription. The reasons why patients don't take all their medication can vary and audits have shown that around half of all the medication returned had not even been opened. This means that patients are ordering and receiving medication that they don't even start to use.

By reducing the amount of medicines being wasted each year, we could increase the available funding for other desperately needed health services.