The guild has written to multiple supporters of the Grattan Institute urging them to rethink their backing of the think tank after the publication of its highly critical Future Pharmacy report.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia has approached multiple supporters of the Grattan Institute urging them to reconsider their backing of the think tank, in what Grattan says appears to be an attempt to put pressure on it over its pharmacy reform proposals.
In a four-page letter obtained by The Medical Republic, guild executive director Gerard Benedet told a Grattan supporter that the Institute’s July Future Pharmacy: A better deal for patients and taxpayers report represented a “notable escalation” in its criticism of community pharmacy.
Headed “Misguided support for the Grattan Institute”, the letter said the institute had devoted significant effort over more than a decade to pharmacy policy proposals, including changes to pharmacy remuneration and ownership and location rules, and reducing the role of Community Pharmacy Agreements.
It accused the institute of promoting “misinformed reforms that have repeatedly failed to gain traction, failed the public interest test and failed in other jurisdictions around the world”.
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The guild letter said its concern was “not with policy scrutiny itself”, but that the report presented a “highly selective appraisal of community pharmacy” and gave insufficient weight to the public health functions performed through the community pharmacy network.
But the letter went further than rebutting Grattan’s findings, directly questioning the recipient’s support for the think tank.
“Given the above failures of the Report, the Guild is urging you to rethink your organisation’s support for the Grattan Institute,” Mr Benedet wrote.
“In some cases, your organisation actively supports the community pharmacy sector which is then incongruent with your support for a body which over more than a decade as [sic] sort to dislocate and damage the community pharmacy sector.”
Grattan health program director and Future Pharmacy report co-author Peter Breadon told TMR the Institute did not know exactly how many of its supporters had received the letter, but knew there were multiple recipients.
To his knowledge, none had withdrawn their support.
Mr Breadon said the guild had yet to publicly address the substance of the report.
“We have yet to see a definitive public response from the guild to the report, that engages with the evidence,” he said.
“The guild seems to be putting all its energy into Grattan’s supporters, presumably with the intent of putting pressure on us.
“But we follow the evidence, and stand by the report.”
Grattan chief executive Dr Aruna Sathanapally also defended the institute’s work in an email to Grattan supporters, also seen by TMR, saying the guild had made “many false and misleading claims”.
“Most importantly, the Guild has not defended deals worth billions of dollars of public money being struck behind closed doors, with little published evidence, and without pharmacists or patients represented at the table,” she wrote.
“We stand by the report, and will continue to stand up to vested interests that seek to influence policy for their own benefit.”
Published in July, Future Pharmacy called for a major overhaul of the way community pharmacy was regulated and funded.
Among its recommendations were ending Community Pharmacy Agreements in their current form, independently setting pharmacy remuneration, abolishing pharmacy ownership and location restrictions, and allowing pharmacies to operate in supermarkets.
The report described the guild as “one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country” and argued that it had repeatedly used its political influence and public campaigns to resist reforms that threatened pharmacy owners’ interests.
It also argued that the closed negotiation of Community Pharmacy Agreements between governments and the guild lacked transparency and that governments did not have sufficient information about pharmacy costs to determine whether existing remuneration represented value for taxpayers.
TMR sister publication Health Services Daily reported in July that the proposed abolition of location and ownership restrictions would clear the way for Coles and Woolworths to establish pharmacies in their supermarkets.
Both supermarket chains declined at the time to tell HSD whether they would be interested in doing so if the prohibition was removed.
Grattan cited overseas evidence suggesting supermarket pharmacies had not come to dominate pharmacy markets following deregulation, while acknowledging risks including market concentration, service quality and access in rural and remote communities.
The institute also proposed a greater role for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in monitoring the pharmacy market following deregulation.
The Guild’s letter strongly contested the Grattan’s interpretation of the international evidence and argued that pharmacy ownership and location rules helped maintain “a well-distributed network of pharmacist-owned community pharmacies”, including in rural and remote communities.
It said medicines “are not a normal item of commerce” and argued reform should not proceed without demonstrating that patient access, medicines safety, professional accountability and national quality standards would be maintained.
TMR has reached out to the Pharmacy Guild for comment but had not received a response by deadline.
Read the full Future Pharmacy report here.
