The Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s NSW branch says it’s ‘ready to help’ prevent avoidable hospital visits.
Around 250 NSW pharmacists will complete accredited prescribing training in the coming months – but the RACGP says the Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s latest announcement is just another “opportunistic attempt” to justify expanding pharmacist prescribing powers.
Guild NSW branch president Mario Barone said the prescribing graduates could practise to their full scope from “day one” and urged the NSW Government to act immediately.
These new pharmacists, from the University of Newcastle and the University of Technology Sydney, have trained in managing 23 common health conditions including ear infections, asthma, reflux, hay fever, and contraception.
“At a time when hospital emergency departments are under pressure, and patients are struggling to get timely healthcare, 250 highly trained pharmacists are ready to help with the capacity constraints of the NSW public health system,” Mr Barone said.
RACGP NSW deputy co-chair Dr James Kelly said there was “no genuine need for this”.
“It’s important to recognise that the bulk billing rate is climbing; it’s up from 78% in 2023 to 84.1% now,” he said.
“The access problems and studies around [NSW’s pharmacy trials] that were improperly powered and poorly designed, and were built to try to solve this problem, are not applicable to today’s healthcare system three years down the track,” he said.
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With 2100 registrars commencing GP training this year, and the federal government having invested almost $2 billion to make GP care bulk-billed, Dr Kelly said it “beggars belief” that building a parallel pharmacist system would make any financial sense.
“I think this is just an opportunistic attempt by the Guild to hijack a topical issue at the moment. Nobody goes to the ED for hay fever, reflux or the pill, and that’s not what’s clogging our EDs,” he said.
While he acknowledged the hospital strain was very real, it stemmed from aged care patients having “nowhere else to go”, a “litany” of mental health presentations, and people with chronic disease who had lost continuity of care.
“Pharmacy prescribing addresses none of these problems.”
Instead, Dr Kelly said there needed to be recognition that the RACGP did not doubt pharmacists could prescribe under a protocol, but that prescribing was often the end result of a diagnostic process requiring extensive training – 10 years on average for GPs.
While ailments may appear “common”, such as reflux, they could be oesophageal cancer.
UTI symptoms could be renal cell carcinoma.
Asthma, high blood pressure and contraception were not mild ailments and required proper consultation with a GP, he told The Medical Republic.
“Both the Grattan and Sax Institute found there were significant gaps in the evidence base provided to justify pharmacist prescribing. The absence of reported harm is not evidence of safety,” he said.
Dr Kelly told TMR that it also became difficult to trace diagnostic harm to the original service, because patients often do not report harm until months after pharmacist interaction.
