Pharmacy Daily | Telehealth left patients without meds

RESTRICTIONS preventing pharmacists from administering injectable medications forced patients to go without critical medications during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, a pharmacy leader says.

Pharmacy Guild of Australia National Vice President, Trent Twomey, told a Queensland State Parliament Health, Communities, Disability Services and Family Violence Prevention Committee hearing last week that rules preventing pharmacists from administering injectables were "nonsensical".

Highlighting issues faced by patients during the pandemic, Twomey noted that while many GPs had decided to operate telehealth-only services, pharmacists were available to assist patients on a face-to-face basis.

"One of the anomalies currently in the drug therapy protocol is a pharmacist can vaccinate, but we can't inject, which is nonsensical really, because we have to inject to administer the vaccination," he said.

Twomey noted that several pharmacists reported that they were aware of patients with prescriptions for injectable medications such as vitamin B12 or osteoporosis treatment, Prolia (densumab), who had not been able to have their medicine administered.

"We can dispense both of them, but currently they have to take both of those medications back to their GPs to have them administered," he said.

"[But] the recommendations from the GP network during COVID was that patients simply didn't get them.

"So we had patients going without their osteoporosis injections, we had patients going without their vitamin B12 injections, because GPs only wanted to provide telehealth services not face-to-face services during the pandemic.

"It was completely nonsensical seeing as our workforce is trained to inject both subcutaneous and intramuscular injections - of which both of these are.

"However, the drug therapy protocol only allows us to do those two things if its for the purpose of vaccination, not for the purpose of administering a drug."

Responding to Twomey's comments, Committee Chair, Aaron Harper, voiced support for extending pharmacists' scope to include the administration of injectable medications.

"There's a very good point you've made, especially as a lot of GPs were hesitant about having people in their clinics, so you can absolutely see the benefit here to making sure we can stop people going to hospital unnecessarily, because they've missed their medications, but you could provide a broader role in a health emergency such as COVID," he said.

Pharmaceutical Society of Australia Queensland State Manager, Chris Campbell, said Australia had fallen behind other jurisdictions when it came to pharmacists' scope of practice.

"If we look overseas, pharmacists can administer medications," he said.

"We have the competence and the competency to do so for legally obtained medicines... [it's] within the scope, but inhibited by the current legislation."