Yesterday I was prescribed drugs to treat my continued battle with the pain from Shingles, which has been constant and unending for 5 weeks now and although it is not spread out across the infected area is now concentrated in one place and I can assure you most unpleasant. But back to the point of the thread I handed my prescription into my usual pharmacy and duly received my drugs. On getting home and opening the box I was annoyed to find that I had received the drugs in capsule form. I actually cannot swallow anything much bigger than half a grain of rice so these capsules were a no-no. This was a mistake on my doctors part and unfortunately as it was not my usual pharmacist went unnoticed at the pharmacy. I phoned the doctor and organised a replacement prescription for a liquid form of the drug and popped along to the chemist to get it taking the original capsules. To be told that I could have just thrown them into the bucket as they cannot be prescribed to anyone else even though I had done nothing more than open the box. On another occasion I collected a bottle of medicine and when I opened it it was still in it's powdered form, obviously had not been mixed. I took it back and rather than mix that bottle, the pharmacist binned it and mixed another., which stunned me as I was more that happy to have back the mixed original. But it seems once you place two feet outside the pharmacy door it the drugs cannot be returned. On chatting to the pharmacist I discovered that all drugs wrongly prescribed were thrown away which got me thinking, he said they might discard a few hundreds of pounds of drugs and this was just a local pharmacy, how much is it costing the NHS country wide? He told me that he had on occasion filled a large prescription to an elderly person and when it was delivered to the nursing home the person had died. The drugs are still thrown out even though they will still be in the bag provided by the pharmacy and remain unopened. I appreciate contamination can be an issue but there has to be a better way of dealing with this issue. God knows what the figures are but the cost to the NHS must run into millions of pounds each year. If I can figure out how to word the request I might try and discover the cost of wrongly prescribed or unused drugs to the NHS via a Freedom of Information request.
It's not unique to the NHS, but happens in all health care settings. It's just one of the costs of providing good care. You do what you can to minimize it, and accept the rest.
Cthippo's on the money. Although it's wasteful, it's the best system for making sure folks don't end up taking the wrong drugs. For this kind of thing, the system MUST be followed.
I think it is one of these wastes that are inevitable really. A bit like food waste in restaurants. Presumably, and I might be very wrong here, these medicines that go in the bin get returned and reimbursed by the drug companies. After all, it's R&D, not manufacturing that is expensive. I would be interested to know if that is the case. IMO, the real wastage is on "alternative" medicine. If it worked, it wouldn't be called alternative. I can't believe the NHS pays for homeopathy.
I suspect the mega millions of pounds spent on lobbying politicians means that a less wasteful way of handling dispensed but unopened medications will not be found. As far as I can ascertain the drugs are not returned and then reimbursed by the drug companies but are instead collected by specialist firms and destroyed. So a win win situation for these companies as obviously replacement drugs will need to be purchased.
Happens with food & equipment and not just medicines. I've got a few boxes of in date food packs, syringes (Non hyper dermic) and feeding tube extension sets. All boxed. All sealed. All sterile. All in date. All surplus to requirements as her treatment changed to use different stuff. All impossible to pass on to someone who can make use of them. And all of an insignificant financial expenditure to the NHS compared to. 1. Compensation payouts to patients who get incorrect or badly managed medication. 2. The consultants who look after my girl. 3. The surgical team who look after my girl. 4. The £10,000 titanium rod my girl has bolted to her spine. 6. The constant procedural and managerial changes inflicted on the NHS by each subsequent government. 7. Everything else the NHS has to pay for
Also you have to consider the potential damage if you somehow injected poison into the medicine vial on your way out.
When I lived in London the pharmacy down the road would have taken them and kept them, When my mother died after having Parkinson's for many years she had a huge stash of meds so I took them to the pharmacy to be destroyed and he told me if I find more could he have them as he packages them up and sends them to India
They would have gone in the bin anyway. At least now someone unfortunate can benefit from them I hope to think. Question is does he profit it from it?
Yea, Ooo look at that Seriously I spent years market trading I saw what the so called charitable people did
You should be more concerned about the restrictions the NHS put on drugs that you require because they are to expensive, they seem to fail to understand that not every person is the same and require different dosages of certain drugs to actually be effective Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk
It's tricky. Pharmaceutical companies will promise you eternal life, and frankly when it's your life at stake you'll grasp at any straw. Meanwhile NICE has to decide what drugs actually deliver (Big Pharma lies; take it as a given). Commissioners then have to divide a too-small budget over too many health priorities, knowing that no matter what they decide, someone is going to be left wanting.
Is it a crime (in the literal sense) to falsify test results, or perform in adequate testing in order to sell drugs?
All I know is my dad was constantly pulled up by the hospital for giving patients above the recommended dosages for certain procedures or treatments, especially when he was performing endoscopic procedures and using midazolam, some patients were just more resistant to the sedative than others especially if you have a person of larger build so he'd go over the NHS guidelines because his patients were uncomfortable. Also back when omeprazole was a relatively new but expensive drug he used to prescribe higher dosages than recommend because that's what the patient needed to actually help them. Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk
Our drug system is different in many ways to the one you have over there. If I get a prescription and need stronger, they just write it and I save my old pills, because there's never enough pain control here. But when my son was with us, we had so many cans of expensive-ass formula, feed pump bags and syringes we still find more stuffed away. I'm still closing wounds with the Tegaderm he got every month. But they decided he had used too much air one month, and we found ourselves paying out of pocket for cylinders of oxygen. You know, oxygen, that we breathe and it's both cheap and easy to bottle? I'm still regularly astounded by our health care system.
They don't falsify; they are just, well, selective in reporting results. That's probably because the hospital is thinking in terms of liability. If anything goes south with a patient it does not have a legal leg to stand on because protocol was breached (and they are there for a reason: obese people are more at risk with sedatives because of their heart and risk of apnoea in recovery; high doses of omeprazole turn out to aggravate the problem in the long term). Sure, your dad is a competent and responsible clinician making a clinical decision (it's what he's there for, after all), but legal is not impressed by that. Your dad is not just personally liable for his actions, his employer is too. These tensions constantly occur in the NHS.
