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Health Bill

My Lords, I have added my name to this amendment because, like my noble friend Lord Palmer, I believe that waste and over-prescribing in the NHS are a tragedy that diverts funds from urgently needed medical care. I refer in particular to those medicines which have a short shelf life, or which are dangerous if taken for more than, say, 10, 14 or 21 days. An example of those would be steroid formulations. The latter are normally dispensed in excessively large tubes or other containers so that up to 90 per cent goes to waste. If over a reasonable period of time enough patients were made aware of this, surely pressure could be brought to bear on the manufacturers to dispense their products in more realistically sized containers.