A HEALTH Service scheme to buy cheaper drugs could be putting patients at risk, a report warned yesterday.

Parallel trading - where medicines are bought in one country for distribution in another country where the price of that medicine is higher - is estimated to save the NHS up to £128m a year.

But a report by UK think-tank the Social Market Foundation (SMF) found that such trade had the potential to risk harming patients.

They urged the Government and the pharmaceutical industry to work together to develop a fresh approach to parallel trading and address some of their concerns.

The SMF report said the complexity of how the goods were supplied, going through many hands before reaching the patient, meant it was difficult for regulators to recall a medicine if a problem emerged in a batch.

It also highlighted the risk of human error being introduced as drugs were re-packaged for different countries in different languages.

The think-tank said parallel trading made it more difficult to crack down on the counterfeiting of medicines.

The possible high impact on the UK was also noted in the report because it has the highest market penetration of these medicines of any European Union country.

The authors said that 70% of parallel trade in the European Union was into the UK and parallel-traded medicines accounted for approximately one in five of the prescriptions dispensed to patients.

In response to the report Pfizer, which manufactures some of the world's leading medicines, said it was introducing new security measures for its products sold in Europe.