Improving the use of medicines has been a recurring challenge in healthcare for several decades and terms such as ‘quality prescribing’, ‘rational prescribing’, ‘cost-effective prescribing’, ‘compliance’ ‘adherence’ and ‘concordance’ have been applied to elements of the process.1,2 More recently, attempts have been made to capture all aspects of medicines use under the heading of ‘medicines management’, which has now been replaced by ‘medicines optimisation’.3 Unfortunately, providing credible, reliable definitions and explanations for these expressions is fraught with difficulty. Frequently the terms become empty catchphrases and expressions that are meaningless to the majority of healthcare professionals. ‘Medicines optimisation’ is intended …