Guild urges doctor groups

THE Pharmacy Guild of Australia says it’s time that doctor organisations joined the Guild in becoming “active champions for mandatory real time prescription monitoring”.

Guild executive director David Quilty said the debate around OTC codeine rescheduling had “finally brought out into the open the much more serious problem of addiction to prescription opioids and sedatives.

“The number of fatal overdoses each year directly attributed to these prescription medicines is multiple times higher than the number where over-the-counter codeine is even considered to be a contributing factor,” he wrote in the Guild’s regular Forefront update yesterday.

He said the codeine decision had “lifted the lid on this much wider problem,” so it can no longer be glossed over by governments, clinicians and consumer groups.

He said organisations such as the AMA, RACGP and RACP should support real-time monitoring, “because as prescribers it is their members who have primary responsibility for ensuring they have visibility for at-risk patients who may be ‘doctor-shopping’”.

The upscheduling of codeine means the need for mandatory real time prescription monitoring of drugs of dependence is “more urgent than ever before...there is a collective responsibility to ensure that the upscheduling decision does not make matters worse for at-risk patients,” Quilty said.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has already allocated $16 million to the project, with Tasmania and Victoria also currently in the process of developing systems.

“It is crucial that Ministers commit to a mandatory, nationally consistent real time prescription monitoring system as soon as possible, with a view to achieving Minister Hunt’s goal of having it in place by the end of the year”.