In an online video,AMA president Steve Robson says that:“State and territory governments are failing you. They’re taking the easy way out. They’re promoting cheap second-class alternatives rather than putting your health first ... Governments are putting profits before your wellbeing.”
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He said that by allowing pharmacists to prescribe medicines,state and territory governments were also “trampling over decisions of independent regulators” and bypassing processes intended to assure safety,transparency and accountability.
But Adjunct Associate Professor Lesley Russell,from the Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics,said the AMA’s rhetoric “strikes me as just about protecting the same-old,same-old”.
“It’s pretty disheartening,really,” she said. “They’re poking at each other with pin pricks,just to needle each other,when the real issue is about the patient.”
Russell said that pharmacists had the same regulatory and legal requirements as doctors to protect patient safety. “The implication that pharmacists would do something harmful is pretty scary,” she said.
“And what it doesn’t address is there will be circumstances when a patient can’t get to a GP,and a pharmacist is better than nothing. Isn’t it better a pharmacist give you a prescription than you go without?”
The new AMA campaign escalates a longstanding turf war between doctors groups and pharmacy owners.
But she said neither the prescribing issue,nor the fight about boosting the quantity of medicine packs from 30 to 60 days’ supply – which doctors support but would reduce pharmacy income from government dispensing fees – was going to save Medicare.
“What’s needed is much bigger and bolder. But this political and policy infighting over the small things means that doing the big things becomes increasingly more difficult and requires increasingly more political bravery,” she said.
Consumer Health Forum chief executive Elizabeth Deveny said Australian patients were not being prioritised.
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“Consumers have strong views and Australians aren’t idiots. But we seem to be a sidebar. You see large peak bodies arguing over whose view about how the system should work should be funded. What you don’t see is what ordinary Australians would like,” she said.
Her organisation’s surveys found most people were broadly supportive of some form of pharmacy prescribing,but felt there needed to be restrictions and that pharmacists should have less scope to write scripts than GPs.
“We look at this and say:yes,there are questions about changes to prescribing practices ...[but] I don’t know I would be as concerned as the AMA seems to be,” Deveny said.
“I think a lot of what’s driving this is the vested interests of professional groups,all who benefit financially from whatever policy is put in place ... Sometimes they align with the general public and sometimes they don’t.”
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