AUSTRALIAN Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) registration processes should record individuals' accreditation to administer vaccines, to enable targeted messaging to be delivered to immunisers, the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS) believes.
In its Survey of pharmacist vaccination reporting to the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) report, the NCIRS said enhancing the AHPRA register "would facilitate identification and enumeration of and communication with specific provider groups".
Currently there is no register of accredited pharmacist immunisers.
"An enhanced register could be used to track how many immunisation providers are available in the workforce, how many are offering vaccination services and which of those are reporting (or neglecting to report) data on vaccination encounters to AIR," the NCIRS said.
"A register containing this information could also assist in identifying pharmacists and other providers who could deliver COVID-19 vaccines.
"[The Department of] Health should consult with AHPRA and the Jurisdictional Immunisation Coordinators (JICs) to enhance the existing register and determine whether trained immunisation providers can have this information specified on their registration and made publicly available."
Meanwhile the survey, conducted between 05 Jun 2020 and 13 Jul 2020, found that an estimated 82% of vaccinations administered by 121 pharmacies were reported to AIR.
Respondents indicated that the ability to use automated reporting of vaccination encounters directly from pharmacy software to AIR was the most important factor enabling reporting to AIR, while difficulty accessing the AIR site was seen as a substantial barrier to reporting.
"Pharmacists' reporting of vaccination encounter data to AIR is likely to be improved through increased adoption of electronic methods of recording and automated reporting processes," NCIRS said.
"Use of software that automatically integrates with AIR is likely to improve both the quantity and quality of data reported to AIR.
"Although recording of Medicare card numbers was strongly linked to completeness of reporting, a fifth of survey respondents indicated that they do not always or ever record their patients' Medicare card details.
"In the time period covered by our survey, pharmacists had the highest proportion of vaccination encounters recorded as 'pend' files in AIR of all provider types, with the vast majority (92%) categorised as 'individual not identified (80)', indicating that the patient's identifying information could not be automatically matched to an existing Medicare record.
"Work with software vendors to make this field mandatory could improve recording of this information and consequently reporting to AIR."
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