Fat Britain sends NHS prescriptions bill rocketing past £10BILLION
Britain’s ever-bulging waistline has pushed the NHS’s annual prescription bill past the £10 billion mark.
Official data for the 2022/23 financial year showed that a record £10.4 billion was spent last year on the supply of drugs in England – 8 per cent more than in the previous calendar year.
Drugs designed to treat type 2 diabetes, a common health complication of obesity, were the biggest burden.
Nearly £1.4 billion was spent handing out pills such as metformin and dapagliflozin.
This represented a jump of almost 60 per cent when figures started in 2014/15 – or an additional £500 million in real terms.
The cost of NHS prescriptions rose to more than £10bn last financial year, the fourth year-on-year increase in a row
One of the biggest costs for the NHS was the treatment of diabetes, a condition linked to obesity and inactivity (stock image)
Diabetes is now a ‘rapidly escalating crisis’ in the UK as the number of people with the condition is believed to have passed five million for the first time
Experts called today’s figures a “damned indictment” of how the health department and ministers had failed to invest in obesity prevention, leaving the nation to pay the price.
An estimated 64 per cent of British adults are now overweight and this percentage is expected to rise further in the future.
Ministers are considering doling out semaglutide – the miracle weight-loss drug loved by HollyWood A-listers – in a bid to stamp out the growing problem.
However, the drug is already being distributed to the NHS for some diabetic patients.
Branded as Ozempic and Wegovy, GPs and other medics prescribed nearly £107 million pounds of the drug last year, almost £40 million more than the year before.
This made it the 11th most expensive drug prescribed by the NHS.
The most expensive individual drug was Apixaban – a drug to prevent blood clots, which cost £430 million.
On the other hand, atorvastatin, a cholesterol-lowering statin, was the most commonly prescribed. It was handed out 59 million times, according to the NHS Business Services Authority.
Treating high blood pressure – another obesity-related condition – was also a major financial burden for the NHS last year.
Just under £242 million was spent on such drugs last year, an increase of almost 3 per cent a year and an increase of 7.5 per cent since 2014/15.
Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, told MailOnline that the numbers were a damning indictment of the failure to invest in obesity prevention.
“Unfortunately, we have a large number of people who are so fat that they need medication to lose weight,” he said.
“But the horror is that we haven’t actually done anything to prevent obesity in the last 25 years.
‘If you don’t prevent the disease, you naturally expect to have to pay a lot to cure it.
“It is an indictment of the NHS that we have such high bills for treatment, prevention is always cheaper.
Obesity and overweight rates have fallen this year after peaking during the Covid pandemic, but are still higher than before the lockdown
About two-thirds of the over-16s in England (64 per cent) are overweight, including tens of thousands who are morbidly obese. This is an 11 percent increase from 1993, when 53 percent were considered overweight. Experts blame sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy diets. Source: England 2021 Health Survey
One million patients, who were at a healthy weight with a body mass index (BMI) of 18 to 25, would cost the NHS an average of £638 each in 2019, the study’s final year. By comparison, severely obese patients with a BMI of 40 and above cost more than double – £1,375 a year. Meanwhile, the NHS spent £979 a year on obese patients with a BMI of 30 to 35, which increased to £1,178 a year for those with a BMI of 35-40
He added that he felt “no hope” that things will improve in the coming years and that the burden of obesity treatment will continue to rise.
Mr Fry also highlighted how childhood obesity meant that young people were overweight for a lifetime and therefore needed a whole range of NHS drugs to help treat the consequences for years to come.
“It’s a no-brainer that we really should be doing something, from birth,” he said.
“I pull my hair out when I see the government doing nothing at all.
‘Prevention of obesity will save a pocketful of money for the NHS in the long run and this prevention should start in the first five years of life rather than stopping until obesity or overweight has already gained traction.’
Nationally, one in ten young people is now obese by the time they start childcare, rising to one in five by the time they reach the age of six.
Obesity has long been linked to a number of other health problems such ase such as diabetes, heart disease and even cancers.
About 9 out of 10 diabetic patients in the UK have type 2 diabetes, the version of the disease often linked to being overweight or inactive, according to the NHS.
A government spokesman said: ‘It is misleading to suggest that the government is doing nothing to prevent obesity.
“We have introduced restrictions on where unhealthy foods are placed in supermarkets, calorie labeling on menus and we are working closely with industry to make it easier for people to make healthy food choices.
“The voluntary sugar reduction program has drastically reduced the amount of sugar in foods popular with children, and thanks to the sugar tax, soft drinks now contain almost half the sugar they used to.”
Today’s figures also showed that the NHS is still spending more than £110 million a year on handing out basic pills that Britons can get without a prescription.
NHS prescription data shows that the healthcare sector has spent huge amounts of money on common painkillers, such as £74 million on paracetamol, £18 million on aspirin and £17 million on ibuprofen.
The health service paid an average price of £4.60 per pack of paracetamol, almost 12 times the price of a Tesco supermarket pack.
The spending on common medicines comes despite health bosses banning GPs and other prescribers since 2018 from distributing medicines that patients can buy cheaply themselves in shops.
John O’Connell, CEO of the TaxPayers’ Alliance said the public would be “sick to the bone” of continuing to pay these fees.
“Paying large sums for over-the-counter pills is an unforgivable waste of taxpayers’ money,” he said.
“With their ban clearly being ignored, NHS bosses must take further action to curtail these stubborn regulations.”
Opponents calling for a ban on the prescription of some common items warned at the time that poorer households would be most affected by the changes and that some families could be forced to go without basic medication.