GPs waste £85m a year by prescribing expensive drugs

Family doctors are wasting more than £100m a year because of the way they prescribe drugs to their patients, a public spending watchdog has found.

GPs could save £85m by more systematic prescribing of lower cost, generic forms of more-expensive brand-name drugs, according to the report by the National Audit Office (NAO).

However, more savings could be made by reducing the number of drugs prescribed each time by the GPs and by keeping abreast of the cheaper drugs available to treat the same conditions, said the report.

"We found that drugs wastage is a significant cost for the NHS: at least £100m a year, and perhaps considerably more than this," the report added.

The findings could see Gordon Brown order a renewed drive to reduce the NHS drugs bill, which is up to £22m a day for prescriptions in primary care alone, excluding hospitals. The NAO said the Department of Health should carry out a survey of residual drugs including those left in medicine cabinets for a more accurate estimate of the scale of medicines wastage.

One of the problems in tackling the waste on drugs, highlighted in the report, was the influence of the drug companies on GPs through their use of marketing. They are investing £850m a year on pushing products to doctors. GPs, surveyed by the NAO, said it was difficult to assimilate all the information they received on prescribing, and many were influenced by what the drug companies told them.

"One in five GPs indicated they felt that pharmaceutical companies have more influence than [the primary care trust] prescribing advisers," said the report. "We found over £200m of potential efficiency savings looking at just 19 per cent of the primary care drugs bill."

The NHS spent £8.2bn on prescription drugs in England on primary care in 2006, a 60 per cent increase over the previous decade.

Attempts to curb over-prescribing and liberal use of repeat prescriptions have been made but the NAO found that uptake of these initiatives had been "low" since introduction in 2005.

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