About the Project

People in care homes often need to take medication through multiple prescriptions. Medications that are not taken – either through changes to prescriptions, or when they are no longer required, or through patients not taking them – are wasted.
Throughout the UK, approximately £50million worth of NHS supplied medicines are disposed of every year by care homes, which represents approximately 17% of the total prescription medicine wastage in England. If this figure is the same in Scotland, that means care home waste could be costing NHS Scotland £17,000 every day. This project will explore innovative design-led ways to reduce this waste.

We want to understand why care home residents do not take their medicine – perhaps there are side-effects or they dislike taking pills. Talking to all the people involved in care home prescriptions is central to this research. We are interviewing professional staff, care home residents, and their families to understand different attitudes and perceptions to medication. We are using innovative design-led methods, such as mapping out the whole prescription system in both urban and rural settings, that will help us identify opportunities for change in care home settings. For example, perhaps the package sizes are too big for those who just need to take it for a short time, or maybe the prescriptions are repeated too frequently.

Ensuring adherence to prescribed medications can reduce GP visits, prescription volumes, emergency calls, A&E attendances, and hospital stays. This will lead to significant environmental benefits by lowering pharmaceutical waste in water systems, as well as economic and carbon savings for NHS Scotland by reducing the production of excess medicines.