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Welcome to the first homepage edition of i2P for 2012.
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Pay For The Cost of Dispensing in Remote

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Rollo Manning articles by this author...

Rollo Manning has experienced pharmacy practice from all sectors of the industry – retail, administrative, policy and remote Aboriginal practice. He spent 10 years with Glaxo Australia and was the first Director of Public Relations at the Pharmacy Guild National Secretariat in Canberra. He has also held the position of Pharmacy Policy Officer for Territory Health Services in Darwin. Rollo is currently a Consultant working in his own practice with remote Aboriginal communities, in Northern Australia.

Every where in Australia when a PBS script is dispensed the patient has access to a pharmacist to obtain information on the prescribed medicine - unless they are a remote living Aboriginal person when there is no pharmacist and no money provided to the health service where the dispensing is done to provide for the quality use of the medicine.

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In urban Australia a pharmacist is paid $6.42 for every PBS medicine dispensed regardless of whether this is an original supply and the first time a patient is receiving the medicines or a repeat supply that may only require a scan and a few key strokes on the computer. A total of $1.4 billion is paid to dispensing pharmacies in fees each year and rising.

The remote living Aboriginal has no such luxury. The pharmacist supplying the PBS medicine receives $2.69 for the “bulk” supply and the health service it is going to for the patient gets nothing.

So what is happening to the $3.73 difference? It is being saved by the PBS every time an Aboriginal person is prescribed a PBS medicine. Given that there are some 1.5 million items supplied around Australia from 34 pharmacies to 166 Aboriginal health services this amounts to $5.6 million. Such an amount would employ a lot of pharmacists to deploy around the remote areas on a regional basis to pass on the information that is needed to maximise the cost of the medicines.

The bureaucrats in the health department in Canberra will say that there is $88 million being spent on reducing the co-payment for urban Aboriginals and this is the contribution “pharmacy” is making to the Close the Gap campaign. So it might but this does not assist the remote Aboriginals who have been receiving free PBS medicines for ever with no apparent improvement in the understanding and adherence to prescribed treatments. The support allowance paid to pharmacists in the supply chain is totally inadequate to meet the need and only provides for 3-4 days of travel to a community health service in a 12 months period. For this there is an allocation of just $3 million a year to meet the needs of the 166 health services and included in this is the bureaucratic administrative process that makes the payment available to the pharmacies supplying PBS medicines under special arrangements under Section 100 of the National Health Act.

The inequity described above is added to by the fact that in most communities there is only one retail store with little access to medicines normally bought over the counter of a pharmacy in urban land. Not only are these products not available but minor acute illnesses places an extra burden on the already overstretched health service which is facing a huge task in tackling the rise of chronic disease impacts on the people.

The question of equity needs to be raised with respect to the supply of pharmacy services to remote living Aboriginal people.

If you want to join the campaign contact the writer at rollom@iinet.net.au

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