A LEADING East Lancashire health campaigner has welcomed plans to put the price on all prescription drugs costing more than £20 – and he’s called on the government to take it even further.

Russ McLean, chairman of Pennine Lancashire Patient Voices Group, said he would like the NHS to inform patients about the cost of GP appointments, ambulance call outs and hospital beds as well.

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“If you cut your finger you do not go to Accident and Emergency, you put a plaster on it. We have lost sight of what the NHS is for,” said Mr McLean.

“Putting prices on medicines is something I have been an advocate of for some considerable time. I think patients need to realise that they do need to accept responsibility when it comes to ordering prescriptions. I would like to see the government take it further, I would like them to put prices of how much it costs to send an ambulance, or a 999 call,” said Mr McLean.

From next year all prescription drugs will also be stamped ‘funded by the UK taxpayer’, following research that wasted medicines cost the NHS £300 million a year.

But Mr McLean pointed out that he hoped those who really needed the drugs wouldn’t be put off by the prices on the packets. “That’s not what this is about,” he said.

That view was echoed by Ron O’Keeffe, chairman of Blackburn with Darwen’s Health Scrutiny Committee, who said he was concerned that it was part of the “slow process of privatisation of the NHS”.

This week the government revealed more than 378.5 million items were prescribed last year, an increase of 55 per cent on 2004, according to figures.