Pharmacy Daily | Call time on professional turf wars

RURAL pharmacists are calling on medical groups and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia to "take a cold bath" and focus on patient care, rather than the ongoing turf war between the professions.

Rural Pharmacy Network of Australia (RPNA) Chair, Fredrik Hellqvist, urged the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine to stop making "ridiculous claims that pharmacists want to practice medicine," while encouraging the Guild to refrain from using "easily misunderstood terms like 'pharmacist prescribing rights'".

"RPNA wants to go on record for the benefit of rural doctors to say that rural pharmacists have zero desire to work against or replace their medical colleagues. Absolutely zero," he said.

"The opposite is true. GPs have the most valuable healthcare skillset in rural communities.

"Along with everyone else, rural pharmacists know and embrace that and want to see GPs' abilities utilised in the best possible way.

"We already collaborate extremely closely with our GP colleagues, who are often also our personal friends, and a large proportion of the work we do is designed to support and boost rural medical practices.

"The two things most likely to keep pharmacists in one-pharmacy towns awake at night are the difficulty of recruiting and retaining skilled staff, including pharmacists, and the prospect of losing their local GP.

"There is a huge amount of common ground between rural pharmacists and doctors, as well as a shared determination to improve primary healthcare outcomes in rural communities, especially in the more remote areas where a GP and pharmacist may be the only local healthcare professionals that patients have realistic access to."

The RPNA's comments came after AMA President, Dr Tony Bartone, described the Guild as "the last remaining cartel in the community that needs to be looked at in terms of anticompetitive practices", during an interview on 3AW Breakfast with Ross Stevenson and John Burns, yesterday morning.

"Many, many eminent economists and regulators have suggested that it's time to remove the restriction on pharmacy ownership and co-location rules," Bartone said.

"I think the community is the one that's missing out."

Guild Queensland Branch President, Trent Twomey, said the AMA's comments were a distraction "to take the focus off how the traditional model of primary care is limiting access to basic services, increasing waiting times and leaving patients with rising out of pocket costs".

"The reality is the AMA has no plan for fixing our health system," he said.

"Pharmacists are presenting a real and practical solution to relieve pressure on our health system and increasing accessibility, affordability and decreasing out of pocket costs for patients."