Apparently, there are enough prescription drugs lurking in people's bathroom cabinets to fund 40,000 NHS nurses.

That amounts to around £800m. of NHS money wasted every year in England alone.

Or, put another way, an estimated 10% of prescription medicines are never used.

Unlike a lot of other people I can think of, when I go to the doctor I hope to leave without a prescription.

I have a very good relationship with my doctor.

He doesn't try to ease me out of the room with a prescription, while I actually listen to the advice he gives.

Of course, there are times when medication is unavoidable – recurring gout and a history of quite bad hayfever see to that!

But am I so different to what must amount to a big slice of the population?

When it says on the box "please complete this course of treatment" I take all the tablets.

But it would appear there are people who save a few – presumably to guard against any repeat bouts of that particular affliction.

These are people who have clearly never been told that failure to take a drug as instructed can lead to them becoming ill and requiring further treatment, while not completing a course of medicine can also have quite serious effects.

And then there are those who just get repeat prescription after repeat prescription after repeat prescription, presumably stockpiling any number of drugs for no apparent reason.

All of it is a criminal waste of time, money and resources and it is about time that a prescription drugs amnesty was called.

A couple of years ago this idea was trialed in, I believe, Coventry in a bid to save the city's Primary Care Trust £8m. a year.

Then the PCT in Coventry called on people to reduce the amount of wasted medicine generated and launched an amnesty as part of a campaign to ask residents to think twice before ordering repeat prescriptions.

People who found they had a surplus of prescription drugs in their medicine cabinets were asked to return them to any community pharmacy in the city for safe disposal.

Presumably those in unopened packets which were still in date were then reissued.

The £8m. a year saved could then be spent on around 1,600 hip operations or more than 15,000 cataract operations.

Now that is the sort of campaign that should be going on nationally – every day of every week of every year.

Waste of any kind, as regular readers of this column will be all too aware, is something I cannot tolerate.

But the waste of precious commodities such as prescription drugs is having a crippling effect on the budgets of an already over-stretched health service.

And someone really does need to get a grip on the situation before it gets even further out of hand.