By GB News (World News) | Created at 2026-09-06 14:02:26 | Updated at 2026-09-06 15:02:12
1 hour ago
Nearly eight million people across the UK are now consuming five or more prescription medicines every day, fuelling what clinicians describe as an over-prescribing epidemic that is sending thousands of older patients to hospital with avoidable drug reactions.
NHS data analysis shows that up to 1,000 elderly people each day require emergency hospital treatment after suffering a preventable adverse response to their medication.
Roughly 2.2 million individuals are taking 10 or more pills daily.
The threshold of five concurrent medicines, known clinically as "polypharmacy," marks the point where the danger of harmful side-effects rises sharply, particularly among frail patients with existing mobility difficulties.
Research from the University of Southampton puts the annual financial burden of this crisis on the health service at an estimated £2.21billion.
British Medical Journal studies suggest two-thirds of medicine-related hospital admissions could have been avoided.
The case of Peter Eustace, a 96-year-old retired print worker from East Yorkshire, lays bare how the system fails individual patients.
For a quarter of a century, Mr Eustace took daily tamsulosin tablets for enlarged prostate symptoms — despite having had his entire prostate surgically removed following cancer in 2001.
When geriatrician Dr Daniel Harman conducted a specialist review at Hull's Jean Bishop Integrated Care Centre in July, he identified four unnecessary medications, including statins and the blood pressure drug ramipril.
"The ramipril is potentially serious and I think it's causative. I suspect it's the reason he was falling," Harman said.
Over 2.2 million people in the UK are taking 10 or more pills daily
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Mr Eustace's daughter Heather Crosby, 64, said she had questioned the prostate prescription with her father's GP surgery but was assured it remained necessary.
"They have just kept rubber stamping the same prescriptions year in, year out, without thinking of side-effects or the lack of benefit that Dad was going to get out of them," she told The Sunday Times.
The roots of the crisis lie in how the NHS is structured. Doctors frequently treat patients for individual conditions in isolation, while fragmented care across hospitals, care homes and GP surgeries allows prescriptions to accumulate unchecked.
Medications appropriately prescribed years or even decades ago for ailments such as hypertension can turn hazardous as the body ages and metabolises drugs differently.
Side-effects from one medicine are sometimes mistaken for a new illness, triggering yet another prescription.
In certain cases, the cumulative impact of multiple drug interactions produces symptoms resembling dementia — confusion, unexplained collapses and difficulty walking.
The NHS has axed a £750,000 programme designed to train staff in reducing unnecessary prescriptions
Coroners have repeatedly flagged these dangers. Edward Cowey died after multiple falls at the Royal Derby Hospital in 2020 while taking 12 medications that collectively heightened his fall risk.
Jacqueline Campbell, 56, died in June 2022 after two decades of being overprescribed pain drugs that suppressed her central nervous system, causing fatal respiratory failure.
England currently has approximately 1,600 geriatricians, some 2,000 fewer than the British Geriatrics Society believes are required.
That shortfall leaves GPs shouldering the burden of complex medication assessments they are ill-equipped to perform under existing time pressures.
The training pipeline offers little reassurance. Medical students spend just four to eight weeks studying geriatric medicine during their entire five-year degree, with a maximum of six months' exposure once they begin working as NHS trainees.
Meanwhile, NHS England has axed a £750,000 programme designed to train staff in reducing unnecessary prescriptions.
GPs are supposed to proactively screen over-65s for frailty, yet only 17 per cent received such a check in 2024-25.
Among 226,000 patients classified as severely frail, a mere 16 per cent underwent a medication review.
Jugdeep Dhesi, president of the British Geriatrics Society and consultant geriatrician at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, is among senior clinicians who have written to the General Medical Council and England's chief medical officer Professor Sir Chris Whitty warning of a "threat to patient safety".
"We have got these statistics and evidence coming at us, and we're all really worried about it, but the system just keeps on looking down and thinking if we just carry on doing the same thing, it'll be OK. It won't," Ms Dhesi said.
She called for fundamental changes to medical education: "We have to reform the training. We just haven't thought hard enough about how we need to transform our health and social care services to meet the needs of the growing older population."
A new national plan for frail elderly care, including prescribing standards, is expected in January.
An NHS spokesman acknowledged the service must do more, pointing to fresh guidance urging regular medication reviews to ensure only clinically appropriate drugs are prescribed.
GB News has approached the NHS for comment.
