GP slams PSA’s 7CPA performance
FORMER Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) Expert Committee - Quality Care, Dr Evan Ackermann, is taking aim at the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia (PSA) for its role in negotiations over the Seventh Community Pharmacy Agreement (7CPA).
In an article published by the RACGP’s NewsGP website, Ackermann suggested the PSA had been “asleep at the wheel” during the 7CPA negotiations, suggesting the Society had failed patients by not pushing for 60-day dispensing to be included in the agreement.
“[They] achieved nothing for their members in any funding or professional development sense,” he said.
“They fell over backwards for the business demands of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia.
“Both the Guild and the PSA have a long history of medication policy misjudgements [such as] codeine, opioids, increased dispensing quantities - so that no one rates their health policy opinions that much anymore.”
Ackermann also dismissed the PSA’s call for Continued Dispensing arrangements that have been in place since Jan’s bushfire crisis, and extended through to 30 Sep in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, to be made permanent.
“[These dispensing arrangements] allow consumers to continually acquire their PBS-subsidised medicines without obtaining a valid prescription from their GP,” he said.
“Continued monitoring is a core quality issue for any chronic disease. It is a very short-sighted strategy to effectively stop or sidestep reviews by the responsible prescriber.
“Pharmacists want to usurp this role, but in reality they have no experience and little insight into a prescribers’ therapeutic rationale, chronic disease management, or management in the context of multimorbidity.”
Responding to the NewsGP article on Twitter, PSA lead negotiator, Shane Jackson, said the piece was “[the] largest amount of selfinterested drivel that I’ve see for a long time”.
“When patients couldn’t see their GP, they were able to get their medicines from pharmacists,” he said.
Commenting on Jackson’s reply, Australian Medical Association Western Australia Branch President, Dr Andrew Miller, called for the deregulation of the community pharmacy sector.