Pharmacy Daily | Closing The Gap program in chaos

WIDE-RANGING IT changes to the Government's Closing The Gap (CTG) PBS Co-payment Relief Program (PD 17 Jun) have left many Indigenous-identifying patients who previously had years of access to the scheme out of the database, with pharmacists forced to deal with multiple problems since the updates were introduced at the start of the month.

The scheme is applicable to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with a chronic disease, or at risk of a chronic illness, and provides prescription medication at a lower price, or free of charge with a Health Care Card.

A number of pharmacy owners and managers have contacted Pharmacy Daily to advise of their concerns, which have also seen patients who were unaware of the program being flagged as Indigenous, with no knowledge or expectation of the change.

Scripts that are mis-categorised are rejected by the new platform, with little ability for the pharmacist to fix, according to Andrew Topp, Group Business Manager for the Capital Chemist Group.

"Even our smaller pharmacies have had multiple problems; I can't imagine how often it is happening in a busy pharmacy," Topp said.

The revamp to the program's mechanics, which were introduced with just a few weeks notice on 01 Jul, include the introduction of a centralised patient registration database managed by Services Australia, as well as new PBS Online alerts for CTG dispensing and claiming if there is a discrepancy between scripts and a patient's registration.

Hospital PBS prescriptions can also now be dispensed as CTG by community pharmacies and private hospital pharmacies, and it is no longer mandatory for prescribers to annotate CTG on prescriptions.

However while the new database is supposed to have transferred all patient details from their previous registrations, it appears this process has not gone smoothly, leading to confusion for patients, prescribers and pharmacists concerned that it will limit medicines access to some of Australia's most vulnerable populations.

The update also requires new patients to be added by a registered PBS prescriber or Medicare-registered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health practitioner, via the Health Professional Online Services (HPOS) platform.

The short notice of the changes, announced in Jun as part of the Seventh Community Pharmacy Agreement, is believed to have left prescribing and dispensing software providers scrambling to update systems accordingly, meaning eligible patients are potentially not being registered for the scheme.

The CTG PBS scheme was first launched in 2010, and in 2019-20 saw more than 7.2 million PBS items supplied, at a total cost to the Government of $54.5 million.