Staffing fax now critical to pharmacy

MONITORING incoming faxes has never been more important following the introduction of bulkbilled telehealth consultations, TerryWhite Chemmart Professional Practice Manager, Chris Campbell, believes.

The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia (PSA) Queensland Branch President, told a COVID-19 webinar on Wed night, that pharmacies needed to consider dedicating a staff member to process faxed scripts as they arrived, following a surge in their use.

“Some of our pharmacies are doing 80% of their volume just in fax prescriptions,” he said.

“If we went to the week prior to the legislation changing and allowing bulk-billed telehealth consults, on average [we were getting] one to three a week, to some of our pharmacies getting 200 to 300 faxes a day.

“The best pharmacies have assigned someone as their role to receive those [faxed scripts].

“What they do is as soon as they receive a fax they’re calling the patient immediately - if the patient’s contact details are not on the prescription they’re calling the surgery and saying, ‘please any faxes that you send to us on any scripts we need the patient’s contact details’.

“The reason why this has been so important is, whilst there have been some products like hydroxychloroquine and salbutamol, that we’ve had a lot of trouble getting in, some of our out of stocks have only been [for] one or two days, but we may not have had it on that specific day, and that person is able to get ahead of it.”

Campbell said that while it had been “okay” to leave faxed scripts until a patient arrived in the pharmacy, “now it’s at a volume where you can’t afford to do that”.

He told delegates listening to the webinar that manning the fax machine would allow pharmacy staff to get in contact with patients when they might still be with the prescriber, which may help sort out issues around the prescribing of products that are expected to be out-of-stock for the long-term.