Professor Trent Twomey, National President
Next year is the final 12 months of the Guild’s current 10-year plan, Community Pharmacy 2025. It’s a strategy that has served both community pharmacists and patients well, guiding our response to a global pandemic, helping achieve cheaper medicines for all Australians, and critically, preserving our proven community pharmacy model.
We are starting work now to develop the next community pharmacy plan—a strategy that will set our sector up for continued success out to 2035 and beyond. The most important part of this process will be a nation-wide consultation with community pharmacy’s stakeholders, including our most important stakeholders—patients.
In many ways, Community Pharmacy 2025 has laid strong foundations for the next 10 years, particularly in taking Full Scope of Practice from a concept on a page to a living, working reality in community pharmacies across the country.
For scope of practice evolution, it’s been a hugely positive short period. In the past two months, governments in the Northern Territory, New South Wales, and South Australia have all committed to empowering pharmacists to do more for their patients, with each jurisdiction drawing on the Queensland Pilot as the exemplar light on the hill.
Empowering community pharmacists to do more for patients is a no-brainer for governments seeking to relieve cost of living pressures and find solutions to blown-out GP waiting times and overcrowded emergency departments.
I was delighted to recently present to Green Cross Health New Zealand. New Zealand are early adopters of full scope of practice, and in Australia, we are fortunate enough to be able to draw on the experiences of our neighbours. Green Cross Health, in particular, is a blueprint for the delivery of holistic primary health care.
It’s now beyond doubt: community pharmacy as we know it is evolving; changing from a traditional dispensary-only model to holistic health hubs, a new frontier in the delivery of primary health care.
With government support secured, the next challenge is for community pharmacists to undergo the study and training required to qualify as prescribing pharmacists. I have done it. Over the course of eighteen months, I went back to university and recently graduated with my prescribing qualifications.
Ensuring pharmacists Australia-wide can access education and training is front of mind for recently appointed CEO of the Australasian College of Pharmacy, Amanda Seeto. The College has an important role in facilitating the upskilling of pharmacists to deliver scope. Amanda herself, now a prescribing pharmacist, has shepherded the merger between the College and GuildEd to make scope of practice and CPD learning more efficient and more accessible.
There is still much work to do in the next term on behalf of community pharmacies and patients, including the development of the next 10-year community pharmacy plan, and bedding down and accelerating the rollout of Full Scope of Practice. The Guild has also already begun planning for the negotiation of the Ninth Community Pharmacy Agreement, due in 2029.
This article originally appeared in Australasian Pharmacy Magazine, November-December edition, 2024. For more information and to subscribe to Australasian Pharmacy, visit: https://www.pharmacyitk.com.au/publications/
