This commentary, linked to our paper in the same issue of the Journal of Medical Screening , discusses the reluctance to consider and adopt the polypill in the primary prevention of heart attacks and strokes, access to the polypill as a public health service, the formulation of the polypill in current use, its prescription as an unlicensed medicine, and what can be done to facilitate the adoption of the polypill approach as a routine public health service.
Competing Interests: Declaration of potential conflicting interestsThe authors declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: NW is a Director of Polypill Ltd, which runs the UK Polypill Prevention Programme. ADH is a member of the Advisory Group for the UK Research and Innovation's Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund ‘Accelerating Detection of Disease’ challenge and a co-opted member of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence Guideline Update Group for Cardiovascular Disease: risk assessment and reduction, including lipid modification, CG181.