Butler told the pharmacy sector’s annual conference on the weekend he needed to find “hundreds of millions of dollars” in the health budget to fund programs that were a mainstay of the health system – including My Health Record,public dental services and after-hours GP services – but had not been accounted for in forward estimates by the previous government.
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However,he would not respond to questions about whether the government would change dispensing rules to do so. “We’re in the pre-budget period,increasingly things become highly fevered and speculative,” he said when asked at the conference.
“Any number of ideas[that] have been speculated about in the upcoming budget ... will become clear in May.”
Ryan said the reform was an immediate opportunity in the May budget for the government to cut red tape,improve access to medicines and make Medicare more efficient and cost-effective.
“The cost of medicines is exacerbated by the increasing out-of-pocket cost of GP visits. Time spent away from work for those visits and for trips to the pharmacist impacts productivity,” she said.
“The 21-year-old on the pill,the 70-year-old with longstanding scripts for high cholesterol,hypertension,diabetes and gout,the 55-year-old perimenopausal woman on[hormone replacement therapy] – all could see their doctor when they needed to,for the right reasons,rather than being forced to go back for routine scripts at inopportune times.”
The Australian Medical Association has estimated patients’ savings would be up to $180 a year on selected medicines.
President Steve Robson wrote to Butler earlier this year urging him to adopt the reform,which pharmacies have strongly opposed and had been shelved by the previous government.
“We think that there is an opportunity for your government to show leadership and move forward with this independent recommendation. It is a safe,practical change that will make a difference to patients. The profession will support you in moving forward to implement the proposal,” he wrote.
But a spokesman for the Pharmacy Guild,which has long opposed the reform,said it continued to do so.
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“The current system of generally providing one month’s supply of a medicine strikes a practical balance between patient convenience and minimising the availability of medicines in a patient’s home,and hence the community,” he said.
“When a patient returns to their community pharmacy for a repeat supply of a prescription medicine,pharmacists have the opportunity to access patient compliance with the prescribed medicine,and can intervene if confusion or adverse reactions to medicines are identified.”
The pharmacy sector ispushing for pharmacists to play a greater role in the health system,and several state governmentsare trialling expanding their prescription powers for items such as the contraceptive pill and antibiotics for urinary tract infections.
Butler has flagged he wants all health professionals –including pharmacists,nurses and allied health workers – to work to a greater capacity as part of the Medicare reforms. However,doctors’ groups have resisted giving pharmacists greater powers to prescribe.
Chief executive of the Consumers Health Forum,Elizabeth Deveny,said the issue of pharmacists prescribing had “become a debate about health professionals protecting their patches rather than what is best for consumers” and required nuance.
However,she said doubling the dispensing rule from 30 to 60 days was a “simple measure that could help consumers access medicines more quickly without the need to visit a GP”.
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