The Beyond Pills Alliance

The Beyond Pills Alliance aims to bring together like-minded organisations and individuals to progress the goal of moving UK healthcare beyond an over-reliance on pills. This will be achieved by combining social prescribing, lifestyle medicine, psychosocial interventions and safe deprescribing. As well as reducing unnecessary and inappropriate prescribing, this integrated approach will improve outcomes and reduce health inequalities.

To progress this approach the Alliance will advocate for actions to:

• reduce the prescribing of unnecessary or inappropriate drugs
• support safe deprescribing and withdrawal from dependence forming drugs
• promote the provision of social prescribing, lifestyle medicine and other psychosocial and non-medical treatments, e.g., talking therapies, for everyone who could benefit
• increase the availability of community initiatives to promote health and self care
• encourage initiatives that tackle the social determinants of poor health.

The Alliance also provided the secretariat for the Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group (2020-May 30 2024, named the APPG for Prescribed Drug Dependence until December 2023).

Both the Beyond Pills Alliance and the Beyond Pills APPG (when constituted), recognises that this integrated approach will include an array of interventions with varying degrees of evidential support.  We do not advocate for any specific intervention, but for an evidence-based and critical appraisal of what works for whom under the broad principle that lifestyle, behavioural, social, psychological and public health approaches should have a more central place in healthcare provision. Membership of the BPA does not imply that either the Beyond Pills APPG (when constituted) or its secretariat endorses all the activities, preferred interventions or views of any member organisation or individual.