Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether consideration was given to including guidance on (a) withdrawal from prescription drugs and (b) support for those withdrawing from prescription drugs in the (i) Structured medication reviews and medicines optimisation: guidance, published on 17 September 2020 and (ii) Good for you, good for us, good for everybody - A plan to reduce overprescribing to make patient care better and safer, support the NHS, and reduce carbon emissions, published on 22 September 2021.

The Structured medication reviews and medicines optimisation guidance sets out implementation guidance for primary care networks (PCNs), including the principles of undertaking a structured medication review (SMR). The guidance provides approaches for health professionals to take when reviewing patients with complex and problematic polypharmacy, specifically those on 10 or more medications. This is not clinical guidance so does not provide detailed information about how medicines are to be withdrawn or stopped.

Any decision to withdraw a medicine would be carried out on an individual basis based on the patient’s individual clinical conditions, the medicines they are taking and their own values and preferences following a shared conversation between the patient and the prescriber.

In December 2018 the Government commissioned Dr Keith Ridge, the then Chief Pharmaceutical Officer for England, to lead a review into the use of medication and overprescribing, the outcome of this was published as ‘Good for you, good for us, good for everybody’. Some of the recommendations in the report are relevant to withdrawal from prescription drugs, including the expansion of Structured Medication Reviews across the National Health Service but do not specifically outline a recommendation to provide guidance on withdrawing prescription medicines.