Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My whole career was spent dealing with illness and disease in patients, and now that I am in this place I am very much focused, along with the Albanese government, on keeping people well. To that end, it means enabling people with chronic disease to take their medications. Approximately 50 per cent of the Australian population—around 11 million people—have a chronic disease, and that can range from asthma to diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, COPD, autoimmune conditions and now some cancers. It is a remarkable story of medicine that some cancers are now regarded as a chronic disease. But in order to maintain people in a state of wellbeing out of hospital, they have to be able to take their medications. These medications are costly, and it can be inconvenient to have to traipse into a pharmacist every month to get them. This is the feedback I've received from my constituents, which is why they and millions of Australians are welcoming the fact that we are determined to make medicines more affordable and more convenient for Australians, particularly those with chronic disease.

From 1 September, we will be expanding the dispensation interval of medicines from 30 days to 60 days. That means that, for around 325 medications identified by PBAC, patients will be able to go to their doctor and receive a script for 60 days. This is a policy from the last government that we have dusted off. It was a policy that was initially proposed by PBAC, and the previous health minister tried to enact it but was howled down by the pharmacy sector. As a result, Australians have been paying billions extra in costs for medications for years. Australia is an outlier in this respect, compared to other advanced economies, like New Zealand, where dispensing interventions are 90 days, Canada with 100 days, and three months in France. We have opted for the more conservative estimate of 60 days. We believe that this strikes the right balance for the community and for the pharmacy sector, who are concerned at the moment around the viability because they will lose their co-payments, which in my community amounts to around $180,000 a year for some pharmacists. That is a significant amount of money, and they are justifiably concerned. However, what this means for patients is a significant saving. Those who have a Medicare card will save approximately $180 per year per medicine. That is nothing to be sniffed at. It is a significant cost-of-living saving at a time when family budgets are under intense pressure.

I used to see patients who were deteriorating, particularly patients with heart failure, who often were on a fistful of medications to maintain their fluid status. They would come into hospital because they had stopped taking their medications—they had simply run out of their script. This is a common scenario. It is happening every single day in hospitals all around this country, both in regional areas where I have worked as well as in large urban centres, and it is completely avoidable. There are studies that show that, by extending dispensing for chronic medications, compliance increases by 20 per cent. That is a welcome benefit, because, when compliance increases, it means that we keep people out of hospital, and that is a positive not only for them but for our economy. There are economy wide benefits to this policy.

We are very keen to work with our pharmacy sector. Our pharmacy sector is a pillar of the health system, much like primary health care, community care, the hospital system and our aged-care system. I regard our aged-care system as being part of a wider health ecosystem. Our pharmacy sector, our community pharmacists, are a pillar supporting all of that. So every dollar of saving we make as a government will be reinvested back into the pharmacy sector to maintain their viability and to raise their scope of practice. We want to stop them from just spending their time behind that counter dispensing repeat after repeat after repeat and, instead, get them involved in more patient-to-patient care so that they can use their wisdom and their experience to help keep patients well and out of the hospital system I came from. We're also expanding the national immunisation program enabling pharmacists to vaccinate above five-year-olds, and the opioid program, which, again, will help keep people out of hospital.

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