404 error: citation not found.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia has called out “petty point scoring” after the RACGP pointed out what appear to be fake references to scientific studies in a guild press release.
It’s just the latest controversy in what is sure to go down as one of the most terrible, horrible, no good and very bad weeks in the guild’s recent history, after the Grattan Institute released a scathing report on the pharmacy sector earlier in the week.
While the Grattan paper certainly made headlines, this latest SNAFU was related to an RACGP-commissioned report from the Sax Institute, released earlier this month.
That report’s top-line finding was that there was substantial uncertainty over the evidence surrounding pharmacist-led prescribing.
At the time, the guild issued a rebuttal asserting that prescribing error rates were 0.7% for pharmacist prescribers but 9.8% for doctors and that consistent international evidence supported the safety and effectiveness of pharmacist prescribing.
The rebuttal contained 11 references to academic papers.
But when the RACGP checked the guild’s work, several references were either non-existent or had been cited incorrectly. Some of the authors cited appeared not to exist, while others did exist but did not write the articles being credited to their name.
In three cases, the authors and article named on the reference written by the guild and the hyperlinked academic article did not match.
One of these was the citation used to assert that pharmacists made fewer prescribing errors than doctors.
The alleged paper, “Prescribing Errors and Associated Factors in Pharmacist Independent Prescribing” by one W Baqir supposedly appeared in pages 149 through 154 of a 2021 issue of the European Journal of Hospital Pharmacy.
While there was a W Baqir who had published on pharmacist prescribing errors in the past, the statistic cited by the guild appeared to have come from an article which actually did appear in that issue of the European Journal of Hospital Pharmacy but was authored by E Turner, M Kennedy and A Barrowcliffe.
What’s more, the actual study compared error rates of qualified hospital pharmacists with more than two years of experience to those of intern and resident medical officer-equivalent doctors, not those of fully trained specialists.
Related
The Australian speculated that some of the citation errors in the guild’s rebuttal were the result of AI hallucinations.
When asked whether this was the case, the guild did not provide a direct answer.
“Predictably the doctors’ lobby dismisses any evidence that goes against their doctor-first control propaganda,” a guild spokesperson told The Medical Republic.
“While the RACGP is focused on petty point scoring on a typo, more than 1 in 4 Australians are waiting an unacceptable time to see a GP. It’s time the RACGP put aside self-interest and put patients first.”
The Grattan’s pharmacy report, by the numbers
$71 million: the profits generated by the guild’s insurance and professional services arm, Guild Group, over the past three years.
7 minutes, 42 seconds: how long the Community Pharmacy Agreement appears to believe that dispensing a ready-prepared medicine takes.
Because the CPA is negotiated behind closed doors, little is known about how the commonwealth dispensing fee of $9.24 for ready-prepared medicine is settled on.
Working backward using an estimated pay rate of $52 per hour and a 1.3 multiplier to capture related on-cost, the Grattan estimated that $9.24 pays for about seven minutes and 42 seconds of a community pharmacist’s time.
$2.79 and $1.54: the allowable additional patient charge and the safety net recording fee, two patient-paid fees the Grattan said could be removed.
The first is a discretionary charge only applied when a patient’s total out-of-pocket cost does not exceed the maximum PBS co-payment.
The second is a fee that pharmacies can charge for the administrative task of recording prescriptions to the PBS safety net. The Grattan believed this task could be automated, similarly to the Medicare safety net.
182: the number of franchisee pharmacies that four key managers of Sigma (Chemist Warehouse) and their families have an ownership interest in as of 2025.
In theory, state rules limit one person to having a financial interest in just six pharmacies.
