Managing Your Medicines

Taking lots of tablets? Colleen Shannon, our Health Writer, has some tips.

- Colleen Shannon

WE are taking more pills and tablets than ever before. In 2015 more than a billion items were dispensed by local pharmacies, according to NHS Digital. To show how fast it’s changing, that figure has doubled over the past 10 years.

But we probably aren’t getting double the benefit, because between a third and half of people do not take their medicines as intended.

Part of the reason might be the sheer number of medicines that some people with a long-term condition have to juggle every day. The total adds up even faster if you have more than one condition, which becomes more common with increasing age. One in three people over the age of seventy-five is taking at least six different medicines.

So I asked Heidi Wright, English Practice and Policy Lead at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, why it happens and what we can do.