UNUSED medicines cost more than £1m a year in Wirral, enough to pay for more than 20 heart bypass operations.

The high figure was revealed yesterday as a campaign was started to persuade people not to ask for prescriptions if they are not needed.

With medicines costing on average around £11 per item health officials say the public need to be aware that wasted money means health authorities are not able to afford other vital treatment.

Now, in an effort to get the message across, experts will be in GP practices across the peninsula as part of a new publicity drive.

In addition, they will man special stands at Birkenhead Central Library, host a display on Age Concern buses and even broadcast tannoy messages at Liscard's Asda supermarket.

Health officials say that nationally nearly 600 million prescriptions are dispensed to people of all ages each year.

However, the experts reckon around that some are not really needed and that £90m is wasted across England on medicine that languishes in bathroom cabinets.

Victoria Jones, prescribing support pharmacist at St Catherine's Hospital in Birkenhead, said: "The slogan for the new campaign, from May 4-14, is 'One Pot Pays For It All'.

"In other words, if medicines are unused or not required, other parts of the NHS suffer."

Ms Jones said previous calculations of wasted medicines in Wirral have shown that unused medicines would pay for 263 hip replacement operations, 22 heart bypass operations, or 1,250 cataract procedures.

According to the NHS, research shows that people often have large amounts of unwanted medicines in their homes. The message is to stop and think before ordering a repeat prescription.

Doctors say people should be conscious of any changes in prescriptions and order only the medicines that they actually need.

When people stop using one particular medicine, or reduce the dosage, this prescription is both useless and costly - yet, findings show, hundreds of thousands of people carry on receiving such unneeded repeat prescriptionss.

Members of the Medicines Management Team from Birkenhead & Wallasey Primary Care Trust will be at the events to provide advice.

They will also urge people to return all unwanted medicines to the local Community Pharmacist to be disposed of safely.