PHARMACY owners who provide services to aged care facilities are being urged to make submissions to the Department of Health and Aged Care about proposals to embed pharmacy services in nursing homes, by Fri 16 Sep.
Speaking at Pharmacy Connect earlier this month, Pharmacy Guild of Australia Health Economics and Policy Committee Chair, Anthony Tassone, said the Department's consultation paper proposes that aged care facilities should be given funding to employ pharmacists directly.
"What the Guild's saying is 'don't give them the money'," he said.
"Look at the pharmacies that are already providing outreach services to the aged care facilities through the provision of medications and participation in medication advisory committee meetings and other services - go to the pharmacy."
Tassone warned the Department's proposals threatened to exacerbate the sector's workforce challenges, by taking pharmacists out of community pharmacy.
"We're highly supportive of the Federal Government wanting to put nurses back in nursing homes - that makes sense," he said.
"But we do not want the unintended consequence of pharmacists coming out of pharmacies, because we are already a stretched and challenged workforce.
"We need to find the right balance here, and pharmacies are already providing services to these aged care facilities, and we don't need the disruption to try chasing and fixing some problem identified in a Royal Commission report that pharmacies can help address."
In a separate session at Pharmacy Connect, Guild WA Vice President, Natalie Willis, noted that the results of a trial of embedding pharmacists into aged care facilities in the ACT "were less than astounding".
"Of course they produced better outcomes," she said.
"We know that if we put a pharmacist in there those [outcomes] are going to be better.
"But they had a lot of problems recruiting pharmacists to actually fill the positions and when they weren't performing clinical services, the directors of nursing and the heads of the facilities just made them do admin.
"So they spent a lot of time performing non-clinical and non-pharmacy services.
"If you want bang for your buck as a government, why would you want to be paying a facility to employ a pharmacist to do admin?"
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