SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Pharmacol.
Sec. Drugs Outcomes Research and Policies
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fphar.2025.1568696
This article is part of the Research TopicEnvironmental Impact of MedicinesView all 3 articles
Facilitators for Establishing a Home-based Medicine Reverse Logistic Systems in Low-and Middle-Income Countries -A Scoping Review
Provisionally accepted
- 1Amala Institute of Medical Sciences, Thrissur, India
- 2Kerala One Health Centre for Nipah Research and Resilience,, Kozhikode., India
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Background: The end-of-use and end-of-life medicines at households are often disposed of improperly, which has harmful environmental impacts. Health hazards like antimicrobial resistance can occur. A home/household-based medicine reverse logistics system can avoid improper disposal of medicine waste, and it can recover any remaining value from end-of-use medicines.Methods-We did a scoping review to identify the key facilitators that help the initiation and establishment of a Medicine Reverse Logistics (MRL) system for the collection of unused medicines from households. Google Scholar and PubMed were the databases searched. A qualitative synthesis of included studies was performed. Themes and subthemes were identified. The keywords used were medicines, drugs, reverse logistics, homes, houses, and households.Results-The awareness level of the various stakeholders, the sharing of responsibilities among stakeholders, incentives to stakeholders, political will and legal framework, and the utilization of logistics managerial capabilities of pharmaceutical companies were identified as key facilitators.
Keywords: Medicines, drugs, Drug waste, Reverse logistic chain, environmental risk
Received: 30 Jan 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Vincent and Thekkumkara. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jose Vincent, Amala Institute of Medical Sciences, Thrissur, India
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