Full scope key for patient care: Guild

EMPOWERING pharmacists to work to their full scope of practice, including authorising autonomous prescribing, will be crucial in boosting patient care, Pharmacy Guild of Australia National President, Trent Twomey, believes.

Speaking on the latest episode of Raven’s Recruitment’s Your Pharmacy Career podcast, Twomey said the scope of practice of Australian pharmacists was lagging behind other developed nations.

Twomey said Australian consumers were not experiencing the full range of care that pharmacists have the capacity to provide.

“We are medicines experts, but we can’t do all of the things with medicines that are required to manage people’s health,” he said.

“We need to be able to prescribe, dispense, administer and review [medications], and we have the training to do all of those things, but we can’t do all of those things for all medicines, for all people.

“The big gaps in that continuum... are clearly in prescribing and administering.”

Twomey anticipated that significant progress will be made in the coming years in expanding pharmacists’ scope of practice to include prescribing and administering of medications, for disease prevention, acute conditions such as “uncomplicated urinary tract infections” and the management of chronic conditions.

“When it comes to chronic disease management, the folly of other bodies, when it comes to full scope of practice is they think that you can have this done disease state by disease state,” he said.

“As health professionals we don’t treat diseases, we treat people... [and] diseases don’t exist in isolation - many people have comorbidities, so if I’m going to be a solution, a healthcare destination to help people manage their chronic disease, we can’t have a ‘structured’ or ‘supervised’ prescribing model that enables me to only practice under the supervision of another practitioner, or only treat one of these diseases.

“I need to be able to treat the whole individual, which is why the only solution to [health] system reform and full scope of practice for Australians is autonomous prescribing for pharmacists.”

CLICK HERE to listen to the full episode.