Medicines and Medical Devices Bill — House of Commons, 2020-03-02
Topic: Health
Luke Morgan Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), who has made me feel rather nostalgic. Listening to her speech gave me a flashback to when I used to go to Grand Ronde and hear someone speak so eminently plausibly in many a debate of which I had very little understanding Let me make this declaration now: I am a simple GP. When I entered the House, I always said that I would speak about the coalface and what really affected me at that point, and that is why I felt that I needed to speak about the Bill today. I welcome it because I approve of the emphasis on the creation of a world-leading research-driven, standards-based clinical care framework that can drive the UK forward, but two aspects have struck me in particular. The first is prescribing, and the second is trials and tests Members on both sides of the House have broadly welcomed the provision for new prescribers, and the flexibility for that within the framework. As the workforce and the demand grow and as the roles change, that new prescription will be necessary. I agree about the importance of ensuring that those prescribers have the necessary due diligence, training and registration, which, after all, will provide the safeguards and the accountability that are needed when it comes to writing a prescription. However, I think that the Bill has missed the issue of prescription waste, or waste medication. On numerous home visits doctors see piles of unused medication, and that does not apply only to their patients: there is a crossover in hospitals and, of course, in care homes. Some of it is purely coincidental as people are taken into hospital or from hospital into a care home, but there is a huge amount of it, and, anecdotally, doctors see it all the time. I have seen patients hand in up to 100 boxes of, say, warfarin, and that cannot be right When I consulted the House of Commons Library, it came up with a figure of £300 million a year in losses from 2011 on the basis of only one study. That suggests to me that, over a decade, it is hard to find sufficient information. Last week I spoke in the debate on the Environment Bill, one of whose first principles is that any other legislation should consider environmental impacts. I think that this Bill would do well to take account of prescription waste, which it could do that in a couple of ways Pharmacies and, indeed, any dispensers could be asked to legally collect the statistics on returns. That would allow us to see how big the problem actually is, and allow us to create solutions. It might sound strange for someone who has worked in the workforce and had lots of paperwork to be suggesting more paperwork, but at least if we open up the statistics, I am confident that my medical colleagues would look at them and see a way to resolve this I would also argue that we should review the charitable donation of medications. I freely admit that there are issues over their storage and over how to check the safety of this practice. However, the problem is not insurmountable if the medications are returned in their original state. If the Government do not address the matter in this Bill, I suggest that they might want to consider it going forward. We could, however, consider a more severe statutory obligation on pharmacies, care homes and dispensers to be far more vigorous in the way in which they dispense their medications and follow up, particularly for repeat prescriptions. Things such as emollients, moisturisers and day-to-day painkillers often pile up and end up on repeat prescriptions, and it is quite hard to monitor them. As someone who has written hundreds of prescriptions in a day, I know that it is very easy to sign them off rather than check them, and if there is no obligation for me to check whether the patient actually needs the medication, who does that responsibility fall to? It is arguably the patient, but if that is not happening, and if there is as much waste as we think there is, I suggest that the Government might want to consider that issue.