Scrap the pharmacy prescribing experiment: Sign the AusDoc petition
At the time of writing, nearly all the details surrounding a reckless experiment in Australian healthcare have been released — save how its safety will be assessed.
Doctors have long been concerned about the scale and ambitions of the pharmacist prescribing trial in North Queensland since it was leaked to the wider world back in 2021.
But with the recent release of the protocols under which pharmacists will be working — protocols that allow the formal diagnosis and initiation of S4 medications to patients with no clinical oversight — the RACGP’s belief that it constitutes a real and present danger to patients seems justified.
The protocols make explicit that the limited training pharmacists will undergo is inadequate for the care they will be expected to provide.
We are launching this petition (see text below) to illustrate the collective alarm in the medical profession at what is happening beyond jurisdiction of regulators like the TGA or the Medical Board of Australia.
The risk of this trial is a national issue, not one confined to Queensland alone.
As such, the petition is being presented to all states and territories as well as the Federal Government, which despite its silence, is still responsible for the safety of primary healthcare.
Please read the petition and add your name below.
Paul Smith — AusDoc editor
Secretariat: Health Ministers Meeting
Federal, state and territory health ministers,
This petition, signed by doctors from across Australia, calls for the North Queensland pharmacy prescribing trial to be abandoned immediately.
There has been extensive discussion within the medical profession about the explicit dangers to patients resulting from misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment in pharmacies.
In its current form, the trial constitutes a radical experiment in medical care covering 600,000 people in some of the most vulnerable communities in Australia, including Indigenous communities.
Pharmacists with virtually no training in the complexities of differential diagnosis are being expected to diagnose, manage, prescribe and dispense drugs for conditions ranging from skin problems and acute nausea to asthma and COPD as well as heart disease risk factors.
This is a pharmacist model of care that has been tried nowhere else in Australia.
Given its novelty and scale, the program should have been formally registered as a clinical trial subject to ethics approval. Alarmingly, that is not the case.
Unbeknown to patients, this trial sits outside Australia’s normal regulatory framework for medical care. It has not been assessed or endorsed by the TGA, the PBAC, the Medical Board of Australia or by any medical college. Â
The majority of patients involved will be unaware of the risks.
Allowing hundreds of health practitioners to prescribe and dispense S4 medications (including antibiotics) also dismantles the prescriber–dispenser divide, which was designed as a safety mechanism to identify medication errors and remove financial incentives for unnecessary prescribing.
Additionally, the program serves to further fragment the delivery of grassroots primary healthcare, at a time when integration, continuity and consolidation of care are considered essential to national health policy reform.
All health systems need to evolve — to provide better care, more cost-efficient care and to provide care in ways that are easier to access for patients.
This petition is not a rejection of reform rooted in evidence.
It is a rejection of an experiment that puts our patients at unnecessary risk of harm.
