French hospitals discard 2 tons of medication in one week: Report

ISTANBUL

French health care facilities discard two tons of medication worth over €700,000 ($828,000) in a week, according to a recent study issued Thursday by Committee for Sustainable Development in Healthcare (C2DS).

Over the course of seven days, health care facilities in the recent study discarded 250,000 unit doses of medication, valued at more than €700,000, weighing over 2 tons and generating 122 tons of CO2 equivalent.

The results come from a seven-day evaluation conducted by over 1,000 professionals across 210 healthcare facilities.

"These results are unprecedented but indicate only a trend," C2DS noted.

The study revealed that hospitals discard medications mainly because over half are expired, a quarter are patient-brought treatments that cannot be safely reused, and the rest are still-usable drugs without unit-dose packaging, making them impossible to return to pharmacy stock.