Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will re-consider the prescription of co-proxamol on the NHS in the UK.

As a result of the safety concerns relating to co-proxamol and its subsequent withdrawal from the market in January 2005, co-proxamol is not recommended for routine prescribing in England. This is detailed in the joint NHS England and NHS Improvement and National Health Service clinical commissioners’ guidance issued in 2019 to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), for medicines with low clinical effectiveness, where there is a lack of robust evidence of clinical effectiveness or there are significant safety concerns.

In the case of co-proxamol, this was deemed to be a product with significant safety concerns. The guidance recommends to CCGs that prescribers in primary care should not initiate co-proxamol for any new patient and de-prescribing of co-proxamol in all patients should be supported and, where appropriate, ensure the availability of relevant services to facilitate this change. We expect CCGs to take this guidance into account and prescribers to reflect local policies in their prescribing practice. However, the guidance does not remove the clinical discretion of the prescriber.