AUSTRALIA needs to develop clear pathways to ensure patients with cognitive disabilities can access funded medication review services, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia (PSA) believes.
In its submission to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, the PSA said there was a "complete lack of data and clear understanding of medicine use in disability care", which needs to be addressed to drive improvements in medicines safety.
PSA National President, Dr Chris Freeman, expressed concerns that the trend of inappropriate use of psychotropic medicines seen in aged care may also be prevalent amongst the disability sector.
"It would be a travesty if standards of care around medication management in the disability care sector were also found to be wanting," he said.
"Inappropriately sedating people with disabilities is not care, it's an abrogation of responsibility.
"There is a critical lack of information on medicines use by people with disability and at the moment pharmacists are in handcuffs when it comes to providing essential medication management support and services to people with disability.
"Without appropriate data it is not possible to help optimise pharmacological interventions for people with disability, nor improve their quality of life.
"Medicine-related data collection with appropriate privacy and data security arrangements is critical to enable co-design and development of robust policies for the disability care sector and to implement best practice medication management for people with disability."
The PSA called on the Commonwealth, State and Territory governments to develop a mechanism to provide funding for pharmacists to deliver quality use of medicines (QUM) services to support disability service providers.
The submission called for the development of medication management frameworks and models of care to be introduced that "clearly integrate the role of pharmacists and facilitate mechanisms for disability service providers to work with pharmacists to implement best practice medication management for people with disability".
The PSA added that barriers restricting where pharmacist immunisers can administer vaccines in some States and Territories should be removed.
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