20 December 2010

Each year Australians spend more than $11 billion on prescription, non-prescription and alternative medicines, but health literacy studies indicate people often don’t understand why they’re taking a medicine.

To address this, on 30 January NPS will launch a new long term campaign to enable Australians to become ‘medicinewise’ – that is, to apply quality use of medicines and medical tests in their daily lives. The first stage of the campaign will encourage people to ask 'why?' as the first step towards making better decisions about medicines.

The Be medicinewise campaign is NPS’s first major event since it rebranded in July 2010 and signifies a new way in which NPS will engage and interact with consumers, ensuring our resources are available to people where, where and in the formats they need them.

The NPS website will be re-launched with a stronger consumer focus including useful information, tools, tips and applications. The new home page and navigation has gone live and will be followed by fresh content in the new year ahead of the campaign launch.

The campaign launch will centre around advertisements and editorial content across the major television and radio networks and publishers, digital and social media channels.

NPS will also work with its member organisations and industry partners to get ’medicinewise’ into the Australian vernacular.

“The term ‘medicinewise’ is a new way of encouraging people to think more about their medicines,” NPS clinical adviser, Danielle Stowasser said.

“Just as people now understand what it means to be green and apply it to their everyday life, we want Australians to understand how to be medicinewise and why it’s important to their health.”

“We know that attitudes towards medicines are a significant hurdle to achieving the best health outcomes, and our challenge is getting people to pay as much attention to what’s in their medicines as they do with their food,” Dr Stowasser said.

This first stage of the Be medicinewise campaign establishes what it means to be medicinewise. This includes:

• Knowing what is a medicine
• Finding the active ingredient
• Asking the right questions ( of NPS or your health professional)

The campaign theme 'why?' acts as an umbrella and will carry through our future programs with specific messaging about common medicines use issues. The first of these will be pain management, lipids and generic medicines, which will be rolled out from March 2011.

The campaign launch will tie in with the inaugural Be medicinewise Week, which runs from 30 January to 6 February. Activities and information about Be medicinewise Week will be announced shortly.

For more information visit www.nps.org.au

ENDS