Expand aged care scope

PHARMACY services provided in aged care facilities should be expanded as part of the Seventh Community Pharmacy Agreement (7CPA), union group, Professional Pharmacists Australia (PPA) believes.

In its response to the Royal Commission into Aged Care’s Interim Report, the PPA called on the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, Pharmaceutical Society of Australia and the Department of Health to adopt a “whole of pharmacy approach” to broaden the services provided by pharmacists in aged care settings.

The PPA backed the Government’s $25.5 million funding boost to support medication management programs, including the 6CPAfunded Residential Medication Management Review (RMMR) program, aimed at improving quality use of medicines (QUM).

The union said the profession should “advocate in collaboration with other stakeholders for increased funding of the residential aged care sector to ensure sufficient skilled and knowledgeable staff are supporting residents”.

“The cap on medication reviews should be abolished, better collaborative processes between reviewing pharmacist and prescriber should be instituted, the reviewing pharmacist should be responsible for monitoring and providing a hand over to another pharmacist if there is a transition of care,” the PPA said.

“To ensure individual accountability, the reviewing pharmacists providing this service should be allocated a Medicare billing number and be subject to the same auditing standards as other Medicare service providers.

“[The profession should] utilise the current 7CPA negotiations to broaden the services that should be available to aged care residents, but also look outside the CPA package for the profession to be an active partner in a health wide collaborative approach to improving the quality of care.

“This will need a whole of pharmacy approach to broaden our outlook away from the four walls of community pharmacy.”