OPPORTUNITIES to expand pharmacy services in rural and remote areas are being lost as a result of disengaged absentee owners, Bourke-based pharmacist, Peter Crothers, believes.
Speaking to Pharmacy Daily, the 2019 Pharmaceutical Society of Australia Pharmacist of the Year, described issues surrounding absentee ownership of rural pharmacies as a "significant problem Australia-wide".
He noted that these owners tended to focus on cost-cutting and ran pharmacies with the "minimum level of staff", leaving employee pharmacists with little or no capacity to offer professional services, and in many cases not providing important services such as vaccinations and MedsChecks, or taking part in opioid substitution programs.
"They've very low engagement with other [health] providers, and also potential service funders," Crothers said.
"In the last 12 months or so I would've had eight or a dozen groups - consultants, people from the local health district, potential medical services providers - come through here and they've been talking about opportunities.
"The latest group was talking about how they can harness latent mental health resources in the community...once they started talking to us they got incredibly excited, because we see people quite often, people who've got mental illnesses are often on medications, we're quite friendly and accessible, and they got very excited about the opportunity.
"But then they wanted to get what they heard from me verified, so they started to approach other pharmacies, and what they came up against were these incredibly stressed young people trying to run a pharmacy for an owner they've never come across, and they tended to say, 'no, no, don't give me anything more... I can't actually do anymore'.
"Their owners aren't interested in providing the resources to do the sorts of things that communities need.
"These are great opportunities to get in and do stuff that we're really good at and get paid for it, and I'm enthusiastic about it, but the funders say, 'I'm just not getting the enthusiasm from these other pharmacies'."
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