'Only Order What You Need' - NHS Dorset's patient education campaign to reduce waste, £ & environmental impact.

NHS Dorset ICBs 'Only Order What You Need' (OOWYN) campaign was a system wide programme to increase patient empowerment, and consequently reduce unnecessary primary care medicines prescribing in February & March 2024.  It was designed & co-ordinated at ICB level but delivered in partnership with GP practices & community pharmacy.

It used a multi-modal communications strategy to reach patients on repeat medications & educate them on their ability to step back from requesting every item available to them, every month.  (Campaign website, posters, desk-top stands, digital screen savers, traditional press pack, GP text messages, smart radio advertisement, newsletter inserts, social media content and Patient Participation Group/Carer Group consultation). 

The information provided to patients was curated to tackle common misconceptions (e.g. items will be stopped if not ordered regularly) & concerns amongst our population (e.g. medication being destroyed if removed from a community pharmacy) & provided positive logic and reassurance for taking action (Stay Safe, Stay Well, Stay Green).

Following the campaign, expected prescription growth was negated and in fact fell below baseline by 15,940 compared to the same months of 2023, equalling a total fall in prescribed repeat items of 65,152 over the last two months of the financial year 2023/2024.  EPACT2 data demonstrated that primary care prescription costs fell by £475,000 over the same time.  Total cost of the campaign materials was approximately £7500. 

Estimating that each item occupies 1 minute of health professional time, the OOWYN campaign liberated 1085 hours for alternative health care activity. Although this time would have been recouped over the medicines use system (General Practice & Community Pharmacy) as an indicator of benefit, this equates to the same amount of time as approximately 6500 GP appointments. Certain GP surgeries found the impact of the campaign on workload to be so positively significant that they independently utilised elements of it again in April 2024.

Using the UK government carbon emission factor for pharmaceuticals (0.621 kgCO2e /£) this project is estimated to have prevented production of 294,975kgCO2e - a key determinant of planetary and human health.

The campaign website is Medicines waste – NHS Dorset and downloadable digital campaign files are located at the bottom of the webpage.

The NHS Dorset communications team are happy to share further campaign materials (such as social media graphics) as well as their campaign strategy document:  Please email communication@nhsdorset.nhs.uk, mentioning if you have an internal communication department or not, as this will affect the file type shared.

We hosted a webinar which should cover most questions (https://youtu.be/CJO7DJUaDV0) but please do get in touch if you have further questions! tracy.lyons@nhsdorset.nhs.uk