Fat Britain sends NHS prescriptions bill rocketing past £10BILLION trends now
Britain's ever-bulging waistline has sent the NHS's annual prescription bill past the £10billion milestone.
Official data for the 2022/23 financial year revealed a record £10.4bn was spent on supplying drugs in England last year — up 8 per cent on the previous calendar year.
Drugs designed to treat type 2 diabetes, a common health complication of obesity, were the biggest burden.
Nearly £1.4billion was spent on dishing out pills like metformin and dapagliflozin.
This represented almost a 60 per cent jump on when figures began in 2014/15 — or an extra £500million in real terms.
The cost of NHS prescriptions rose to over £10billion last financial year, the fourth year-on-year increase in a row
One of the biggest costs to the NHS was for 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 thought to have exceeded five million for the first time
Experts called today's figures a 'damming indictment' of how the health service and ministers had failed to invest in the prevention of obesity, forcing the nation to now pay the price.
An estimated 64 per cent of British adults are now overweight, with rates expected to soar even more in the future.
Ministers are contemplating dishing out semaglutide — the miracle weight loss jab beloved by HollyWood A-listers — in a bid to stamp out the growing problem.
The drug, however, is already doled out on the NHS for some diabetes patients.
Branded as Ozempic and Wegovy, GPs and other medics prescribed almost £107m pounds of the drug last year, nearly £40m more than the year prior.
This made it the 11th most expensive drug prescribed on the NHS.
The most expensive individual drug was Apixaban — a medication to prevent blood clots, which cost £430million.
On the other hand, atorvastatin — a cholesterol-busting statin — was the most commonly prescribed. It was dished out 59million times, according to the NHS Business Services Authority.
Treating high blood pressure — another obesity related condition — was also a big financial burden for the NHS last year.
Just under £242million was spent on such drugs last year, a rise of almost 3 per cent per annum, and up 7.5 per cent since 2014/15.
Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, told MailOnline the figures were a damning indictment of the failure to invest in obesity prevention.
'Unfortunately, we have a huge number of people who are so fat they need drugs in order to lose weight,' he said.
'But the horror is we've basically done nothing for the last 25 years to prevent obesity in the first place.
'If you don't prevent the disease from occurring you naturally have expect to have to pay a lot to cure it.
'It's an indictment of the NHS that we have such high bills for treatment, prevention is always cheaper.
Rates of obesity and being overweight have fallen this year after spiking during the Covid pandemic, but are still higher than pre-lockdown
Around two thirds of over-16s in England (64 per cent) are overweight, including tens of thousands who are morbidly obese. This is an 11 per cent rise on 1993, when 53 per cent were considered overweight. Experts blame sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy diets. Source: Health Survey for England 2021
