The NHS spends £8billion on medicines a year and issues 752 million prescriptions.
According to the National Audit Office, medicines worth over £100million are returned unused every year but this is a cautious estimate of the total drugs wastage as it only relates to medicines actually returned. The Department of Health estimates that as many as 1 in 9 households have at least one prescribed medicine no longer being used.
Pharmacy based services such as MUR and repeat dispensing are proven ways of ensuring prescribed medicines are used rather than being thrown away.
The first advanced service within the community pharmacy contract for England and Wales is Medicines Use Review (MUR) and Prescription Intervention (PI). Although there are two titles, these are two parts of the one advanced service; what is different is what triggers you to provide the service
WHAT IS AN MUR?
MUR is a planned face-to-face consultation between a pharmacist and a patient to discuss their medicines, both prescribed and non-prescribed. The review is concordance-centred and aims to help increase patients’ knowledge and understanding of their medicines, including how and why they should be taken. It also provides an opportunity to highlight any concordance issues, side effects or other medicine-related problems from the patient’s perspective and propose solutions if appropriate.
