In a very unusual step, insurer Avant Mutual has spoken out against the Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s latest push for prescribing rights.
Despite having traditionally shied away from the debate on scope expansion, medical indemnity firm Avant Mutual is now publicly warning against pharmacist-led prescribing.
“We are not an anti-pharmacist organisation,” Avant chief medical officer Professor Steve Robson told The Medical Republic.
“We are all about patient safety, and so we are commenting from the perspective of patient safety.
“We agree completely that Australians need access to care – that’s not in dispute, and we’re not about trying to limit access.
“What we are saying is, there’s a difference between being able to get care and [being able to] get safe care.”
The trigger for Avant to take its concerns public was the Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s Rewriting the Script report, which was released in part last week.
Avant was able to obtain a full copy of the report and, according to Professor Robson, came to the conclusion that patient safety risks were not being taken into account as part of the economic analysis.
“Our analysis shows that almost one in six regulatory or civil claims involves a prescribing issue, so that makes it a very, very large driver of claims,” Professor Robson, the immediate past president of AMA federal, said.
“That means that there are concerns about adverse outcomes for patients, and that really brings us into the patient safety wheelhouse of Avant. We just couldn’t not comment on such a huge paradigm shift that just blithely seemed to skate over risks for patients.”
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Professor Robson, who also holds an economics degree, emphasised that Avant’s numbers came from a pool of medical professionals who had undergone several years of training.
“The first thing that anybody who’s trying to take the pharmacy guild report seriously needs to understand is that harm from prescribing problems is not theoretical, it is a huge thing that we encounter, and that needs to be drawn into account,” he said.
“The other really important thing is that Avant members are doctors who have been trained for years and are highly experienced, and still in that group – who are so highly trained, so highly experienced – we’re having these kinds of problems.
“Somebody who’s done a part-time course and a few extra CPD hours, [where] nobody’s been able to monitor what their level of risk is … it’s just unmodelled.”
Avant is now calling for a nationally consistent prescribing framework, developed with input from all health professions.
This is actually similar to what the pharmacy guild called for in last week’s report, which was nationally consistent regulatory reform.
The key difference is that the pharmacy guild made no mention of cross-profession input.
