Federal AMA submission to Australian Pharmacy Council consultation
Our submission to the Australian Pharmacy Council’s (APC) review of accreditation standards for pharmacist prescriber education programs strongly reiterates our concerns about pharmacist prescribing, as well as the APC’s proposal.
The APC’s review is intended to support the Pharmacy Board of Australia’s (PBA) scheduled medicines endorsement for pharmacists.
In our submission, we acknowledge the value of certain inclusions in the proposal, including the Australian Qualifications Framework 8 minimum requirement for programs, references to the importance of collaborative care model, improvement in cultural safety, acknowledgement of conflicts of interest, and the competencies required by the National Prescribing Competencies Framework (NPCF).
In our submission we compared the conclusions drawn from the APC’s literature with those from the recent Sax Institute report, highlighting that there is limited empirical evidence to support the benefits and safety of autonomous pharmacist prescribing implemented in community pharmacies. The Sax Institute report also cautioned against adopting overseas practices without appropriate evaluation.
We highlighted the scope of practice requirement stated by the Health Professionals Prescribing Pathway (HPPP) for endorsements for scheduled medicines. Contrary to the recommendations, the PBA’s endorsement and the APC’s proposed standards do not restrict the pharmacist prescriber’s scope of practice but instead expand it to include Schedule 8 medicines.
We are also concerned that the accreditation standards have not specified how prescriber programs would accommodate participants with different self-ascribed scopes of practice and enable them to achieve the required diagnosis and prescribing competencies. The APC document also does not specify how competencies such as continuity of care, interprofessional collaboration and clinical governance would be managed and assessed.
We have recommended that the APC defer the review of the accreditation standards as the PBA’s endorsement is yet to be finalised. Failing to do so could risk patient safety if the requirements implemented are not sufficiently rigorous.
