I often confuse my plain white tablets — shouldn’t they have markings?

I am simply an ordinary patient of my local GP practice. I have several medical conditions controlled by a considerable number of tablet medications of various shapes, colours and sizes. I normally sort these into daily doses for seven days.

Today, I noticed my morning intake of tablets was one short of what it should be. The problem was that several of the tablets were simply plain white with no markings, and so it was impossible to determine which was the missing tablet.

This is likely to be a problem encountered by many patients — what is the pharmaceutical industry doing to bring about an internationally-recognised system of tablet markings?

Barry Oakley, patient