Liam Quaide (Cork East, Social Democrats)
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267. To ask the Minister for Health her plans to introduce a nationwide scheme to allow people return unused or out of date medication to pharmacies; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [21684/25]

Jennifer Carroll MacNeill (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael)
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Pharmacists play a crucial role delivering many important services to support the health of our communities, offering expert advice, ensuring the safe supply of medicines, and delivering vaccines to the public. They are also among the most accessible healthcare professionals nationwide.

There has been ongoing engagement between Department officials and the Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) regarding the potential to extend the scope of practice of community pharmacists and the enablers needed to implement that.

My Department has been carrying out a comprehensive review of the pharmacy fee structure in the context of this engagement and the intended expansion of the scope of pharmacy practice, following the recommendations of the Expert Taskforce to Support the Expansion of the Role of Pharmacy. The State invests a considerable amount of funding in community pharmacy each year.

Building on these strong foundations, I believe that pharmacists can do more for our health service and I want to see an expansion of the services offered by pharmacists. This ambition is reflected in the commitments and priorities set out in the new Programme for Government: Securing Ireland’s Future.

I look forward to working closely with the sector in 2025, including advancing engagements between my Department and the HSE with the IPU, as the representative body for community pharmacists, in relation to the community pharmacy contract and associated enablers.

It is my intention as part of these engagements with the pharmacy sector that the implementation of a national Disposal of Unused Medicines Properly (DUMP) programme will be discussed. Previous DUMP campaigns have been successfully run locally by the HSE and facilitated by local community pharmacists. I want to take the lessons learned from these and implement a national DUMP programme.

In addition to the collection of unused or expired medicines, there is also a need to raise greater patient awareness to ensure the appropriate use of medicines prescribed and to reduce the instances of medicine wastage, with all the environmental risks associated with such.

I believe that there is a real opportunity to work collaboratively with community pharmacists to make a significant difference to patient outcomes. Of course, any publicly funded pharmacy service expansion should address unmet public healthcare needs, improve access to existing public health services, and provide better value for money.