Community pharmacies can provide a cost-effective solution to the challenges facing the health system.
Speaking at the Guild NSW Branch’s annual Parliamentary Dinner, Pharmacy Guild of Australia National President, Trent Twomey, said politicians from all sides should follow Queensland’s lead in expanding the profession’s scope of practice.
Professor Twomey noted that Australia lagged other OECD jurisdictions in authorising pharmacists to work to their full scope of practice.
“Unfortunately, with the great federation of Australia, NSW is sadly not leading the way in the amount of primary healthcare services that the citizens can receive from their local community pharmacy,” he said.
Using NSW as an example, Professor Twomey said community pharmacy had a solution.
“The solution that we have is to be able to use all the underutilised skills and knowledge that all of the community pharmacists, and indeed our pharmacy assistants, have to turn each and every one of the 2,000 pharmacies in the State of NSW into proper primary healthcare hubs,” he said.
“There are over 200,000 presentations to emergency departments in the State of NSW each and every year that can be avoided, if we simply adopted the scope of practice model that the Palaszczuk Government announced in Queensland.
“Not one dollar is required from the purse of the NSW Government, not one dollar is required from the taxpayers of NSW.”
Professor Twomey said that with NSW to go to the polls in March next year, the Guild wanted to engage with politicians and patients to discuss how to deliver better access to health services in the State, and what role pharmacists could play in the future.
He said patients did not want to have to wait four hours in an emergency department.
“And they don’t want to have to wait for four days to get a general practice appointment,” he said.
“We come here with a solution . . . and we don’t want a single dollar for it.”
