Tonnes of unused medicine dumped in HSE scheme

OVERDOSE suicide attempts and accidental poisoning of children are two reasons the Health Service Executive (HSE) is encouraging people to dump unused and out-of-date medicines.

Already three-and-a-half tonnes of unused medicines have been disposed of in the south of the country in 2009 under the HSE DUMP (Dispose of Unused Medicines Properly) campaign, a 67% increase on the 2007 figure.

Louise Creed, a community pharmacist in the HSE South, said the campaign had raised public awareness of how excess medicines in the home can pose a hazard, particularly to children or other vulnerable people.

“As well as the hazards posed by overdose, accidental poisoning and damage to the environment, medicines can change when out of date and may end up being harmful to those who take them. We would, therefore, also encourage people to discuss their prescription regularly with their doctor or pharmacist as they may already have enough medicine at home and may not need to get the full prescription dispensed,” Ms Creed said.

Consultant psychiatrist Dr Siobhán Barry said the DUMP project, in place in the east of the country since 2002, had been used to dispose of tonnes of unwanted psychotropic medicine and had been set up as a suicide prevention measure.

Dr Barry said there was “disproportionate investment in pharmaceutical interventions” to treat people with mental illness and she had “huge concerns about the amount of medication washing about”.

Dr Barry also criticised what she described as the inequitable treatment of psychiatric patients “inside and outside the Pale”.

“If you are a taxpayer living in Cork, and you attend a public psychiatric clinic, you have to pay for your medicines. In Dublin, if you go to a public clinic, you do not pay.”

Dr Barry said this inequity had given rise to the type of scenario where a family whose son had been treated in her clinic in Dublin came to her to write his prescriptions even though he had moved to college in Cork.