Tassone slams AMA hypocrisy

PHARMACY Guild Victorian branch president Anthony Tassone says a renewed call by doctors’ groups to open up pharmacy ownership to non-pharmacists “beggars belief,” in the light of the medical profession’s own experiences with corporatisation.

He has particularly criticised a submission by the Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association, which asserted that current ownership restrictions “prevent the development of healthcare models that could benefit patient care”.

That’s despite an AMA paper on General Practice Corporatisation which warns that “a corporation’s needs to generate profits for third parties has the potential to distort normal professional patterns and lead to less than optimal outcomes for the consumer in terms of costs, convenience and health outcomes”.

Tassone said the AMA and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners “seem fixated with pharmacy regulation,” accusing the doctors’ groups of jealousy, wanting to impose on pharmacy the same corporate ownership structures which have seen their members lose control over the terms and conditions of general practice.

The Guild Vic president also highlighted a Federal Department of Health report on The State of Corporatisation in general practice, which found that “at its worst, a GP working for a corporate body may not act as an agent of their patient, but of a corporation whose main concern is profits”.

Tassone said “while it would be hard to ‘wind back the clock’ on ownership regulation of medical centres, inflicting poor policy on others is not the answer and is downright flawed logic”.