Everyone knows that the NHS spends a lot of money on medicines, and some unknown proportion of that spend is wasted when those medicines are not taken. The National Audit Office wants to print the cost of drugs on packets to discourage us feckless patients from wasting precious NHS resources by failing to take the medicines we have been prescribed. This idea may well appeal to doctors because it doesn’t require them to do anything new or different.
Is there any evidence that knowing the cost of their medicines will make patients any more likely to take them? None that I know of. If the underlying cause of non-compliance is indeed thoughtless irresponsibility on the part of patients, it’s hard to imagine that simply seeing the cost on the box will have much impact on their behaviour. Isn’t it just as likely that some cautious elderly patients become so alarmed at the cost of their repeat prescriptions that they eke out the medicines by taking them in smaller doses or less often "to save the NHS money", particularly if the medicines concerned don’t have any immediate effect on how they feel? But as we know, a much greater cost of non-compliance is the knock-on effect of avoidable complications and unnecessary treatment when conditions deteriorate.
As so much research has shown, the real drivers of non-compliance are patients’ beliefs about the medicine; that is their experience or fear of side effects, dependency and long-term harm, balanced against their understanding of why they need the medicine and the likely consequences if they do not take it. Side effects - real or imagined - are the number one concern.
Patients make their own judgements about risks and benefits of medicines, but those judgements are not always well informed. People listen to doctors, and what doctors tell them will be far more influential than seeing the price on the box. Doctors could do more to talk to patients about medicines when they prescribe, to encourage them to ask questions and to help them make better informed choices about medicine taking. Let’s start there.