Thought Leadership

The NHS in England spends at least £300 million each year on medicines that end up being thrown away, probably significantly more. The underlying issue is accountability: it’s unclear who is responsible for measuring and addressing the problem locally or nationally. As a result, medicines waste remains largely invisible to the people prescribing and dispensing drugs, and the system fails to learn and improve.

This is exactly the challenge the Treasury’s Office for Value for Money identified in late 2025, making “new models of care in the NHS and communities” one of only four cross-government priority areas for waste review. As care shifts to thousands of community touchpoints, medicines waste doesn’t just persist. It multiplies.

Different prescribers work in different systems while patients collect medications from multiple providers, creating no single view of what’s been prescribed, dispensed, or actually taken. By the time someone notices the pattern, hundreds of thousands of pounds in medicines have already been binned.

Manual oversight cannot solve invisible waste. When medicines waste remains hidden and nobody is measuring it systematically, the problem compounds in silence. Advanced analytics change this by tracking prescribing patterns across fragmented systems and surfacing anomalies as they happen: duplicate prescriptions, medications prescribed but never collected, unusual ordering patterns. Not weeks later during an audit, but immediately, when intervention can prevent waste rather than simply document it.

The June 2025 Spending Review mandated that all departments deliver at least 5% savings and efficiencies by 2028-29. The NHS cannot meet that target while £300 million in medicines disappears annually into an accountability void.
The Counter Fraud Conference on the 26^th February, arrives as the Treasury spotlight intensifies. I am excited to discuss these issues further with Jonathan Van-Tam and Lord James Bethell.