Australia’s pharmacy lobby is “deliberately misleading consumers with a dishonest scare campaign” by claiming 133 strengths and combinations of medicines are in short supply, a spokesperson for the health minister, Mark Butler, has said.
In response to reforms that will see patients with certain stable but chronic conditions able to buy 60 days’ worth of medicine on a single prescription instead of 30 days, the Pharmacy Guild said 17% of the 325 eligible medicines had shortages. The guild says while some medicines might be widely available in certain strengths, other dosages of the same medicines are scarce, affecting 133 medicines.
The Pharmacy Guild president, Trent Twomey, has written to all Labor MPs saying: “The government is yet to guarantee that no patient and no community pharmacy will be worse off under these changes.”
But a spokesperson for Butler said of the medicines subject to 60-day dispensing, just seven of those on the shortage list don’t have an alternative, such as other brands, strengths or formulations available for substitution.
“The fact is the pharmacy lobby group is deliberately misleading consumers with a dishonest scare campaign,” she said.
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“Most shortages are short term. The phased rollout over the cheaper medicines policy in three tranches, along with the fact patients will exhaust their existing prescriptions first, will minimise the likelihood of a sudden surge in demand.”
Dr Ashley Hopkins, who is a pharmacist and the head of clinical epidemiology research group at Flinders University, is not affiliated with the guild and said he could see the benefits of the reforms to patients on multiple medications.
“People with chronic conditions may be on multiple medications and may end up at the pharmacist even more frequently than every 30 days, sometimes every two weeks or more and that’s a burden on them,” he said. “So in that sense these reforms are good for patients.”
But he has concerns about the number of medications eligible for extended prescribing and said some patients were prescribed a change to their medications which would leave them with an excess supply of their previous medicines, leading to waste and medication hoarding.
Dr Elena Schneider-Futschik, of the University of Melbourne’s department of pharmacology, agreed patients with conditions such as heart disease, hypertension and chronic pain would benefit.
She believes medicine shortages can be managed given the government has approved the temporary importation of an overseas-approved medicine as a substitute for one that is in short supply, as long as it has been previously registered in Australia.
But she is worried some pharmacists will be adversely affected.
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“For each script, a pharmacist receives a fee doing a service to the community,” she said. “Pharmacies rely on these fees, which often make a large proportion of their business. This [reform] could then result in reduced operating hours as pharmacists might need to scale back.”
Medicine shortages are often unavoidable due to shortages of raw materials due to natural disasters, logistical difficulties, batches of the medicine not meeting standards, or increased demand.
The government pays wholesalers more than $200m a year to deliver medicines to pharmacies anywhere in Australia, so if a pharmacy is running low on medicine, for most medicines, wholesalers are required to deliver to any pharmacy within 24 hours.
Changing the current 30-day supply to 60 days for patients with stable but ongoing conditions was a recommendation of clinical experts at the independent pharmaceutical benefits advisory committee in 2018, but the measure was not implemented by the former Coalition government.
General patients will save up to $180 a year and concession card holders up to $43.80 for each medicine under the reforms.