The Pharmacy Guild of Australia claims pharmacist prescribing will aid cardiovascular risk reduction. What it means by this is unclear.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia claims that pharmacist-led prescribing equates to $1.5 billion in savings due to “increased wellbeing” and is now pushing for cardiovascular prescribing programs.
The guild’s latest report, Rewriting The Script: Unlocking the Value of Pharmacist Prescribing In Australia, said pharmacist prescribing would shift routine prescription renewals and stable hypertension reviews from general practice to community pharmacy.
However, their report – which was prepared by healthcare consultancy HTANALYSTS – didn’t explain precisely what autonomous prescribing for cardiovascular risk reduction would entail.
Ten pages of the report are missing.
According to the report’s table of contents, these pages include case studies on asthma, COPD, hormonal contraception, and cardiovascular risk reduction.
After the missing pages, there is one page detailing the potential savings related to pharmacist prescribing for cardiovascular risk reduction.
A pharmacy guild spokesperson told The Medical Republic the organisation plans to release the pages at a later date, but declined to explain this decision in writing.
The report said that across the four case studies alone, pharmacist prescribing would annually deliver over $1 billion in direct health system savings, free up over 10 million GP appointments for more complex consultations and prevent more than 30,000 hospitalisations.
In terms of cardiovascular risk reduction, the report estimates that pharmacist-led prescribing would yield $268.8 million annually in government savings from GP appointments and prevent 300 CVD-related ED presentations.
“These quantified impacts likely underestimate the total system benefits,” the report said.
However, AMA President Dr Danielle McMullen warned against further fragmentation of the healthcare system and emphasised the importance of supporting the government’s move towards integrated, GP-led multidisciplinary teams, as outlined in the Primary Health Care 10 Year Plan 2022-2032.
“We continue to be frustrated and disappointed by state governments’ and now the pharmacy board’s push towards autonomous pharmacy prescribing,” she told TMR.
One of the report’s three priority actions was to embed pharmacist prescribing within shared electronic health records, interoperable prescribing systems and secure messaging to ensure real-time communication with GPs and continuity of care.
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Other priorities included nationally coordinated regulatory reform and sustainable funding, such as remuneration for pharmacist consultations, PBS funding for pharmacist-prescribed medicines, and support for shared-care models.
Under the Queensland cardiovascular risk and hypertension pilot protocol, pharmacist prescribers must access and interpret patient records before prescribing.
“We’ve got to be honest that those systems don’t exist [nationally]. There isn’t a shared patient record of the level of detail that would allow that to happen today,” said Dr McMullen.
She said although more information will be added to My Health Record, these systems cannot substitute GPs’ thorough understanding of a patient’s complete health history.
“[Pharmacists] merely seeing a patient in an isolated fashion and writing a notification back to the GP is not what we would consider genuine collaborative work,” she said.
Dr McMullen said it would create information silos, increase the workload for practitioners and patients by requiring them to retell their medical histories, and potentially increase the risk of errors.
“If we’re going to fund anything, we should be funding getting pharmacists into our general practices to help boost our capacity to provide medicine information and awareness, and medicine reviews,” she said.
A RACGP spokesperson expressed similar concerns.
“There is insufficient high‑quality, long‑term clinical evidence to support pharmacist prescribing for conditions like asthma, COPD or hormonal contraception outside a GP-led model of care,” the college said.
The guild report’s impact models, which assessed the direct and indirect savings from pharmacist prescribing across the four case studies, were analysed over a 1-year period in 2025.
Costs were sourced from existing literature and inflated to 2025 dollars using the ABS CPI index.
Among the report’s justifications for pharmacist prescribing was the RACGP’s General Practice Health of the Nation 2025 survey, which reported a decline in the number of GPs from 117 full-time equivalents to 113 per 10,000 people between 2019 and 2024, with particularly low numbers in outer regional and remote areas.
“The solution to workforce pressures is to continue investing in GP-led care, not to bypass it,” the RACGP spokesperson said.
The RACGP said introducing prescriptions into retail settings risks missed diagnoses and duplication – potentially increasing costs over time rather than reducing them.
