Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Community Affairs References Committee, I present the report on the effectiveness of special arrangements for the supply of Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme to remote area Aboriginal health services, together with documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This is a very important report because it pertains to the health of Aboriginal communities and to helping to close the gap. Many people are probably not aware of this scheme, which comes in two parts. It has special arrangements for the supply of PBS medicines to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in remote communities. This is obviously in place to promote and improve access to and use of PBS medicines. The two main programs we looked into are the section 100 supply program, which provides payments to community pharmacies for dispensing PBS medicines in bulk to remote area Aboriginal health services, and the section 100 pharmacies support allowance, which provides payments to community pharmacists to help Aboriginal health services to improve the way that their patients use PBS medicines.

These are very important programs, and I would particularly like to thank those who made very substantive submissions to this inquiry. In fact, they were so substantive that we did not have to hold a hearing, because such excellent information was supplied to us. I would like to thank the submitters and also the secretariat for the work they did. Many people will be aware of the workload that the Community Affairs Committee has had, both with legislation and references, this year, so I would like to thank the secretariat very much for their report.

We made a number recommendations in this report, and I hope that the government takes them on. One of the things the committee found is that other inquiries have made recommendations about these programs, but unfortunately those recommendations have not been implemented. I suggest that that is one of the reasons we have had to review this again and, in some cases, make some similar recommendations. We have made 10 recommendations, one of which related to the information we have showing that the effectiveness of the scheme, in terms of the amount of medication that is being supplied to remote communities, has gone up. We know the program, from that point of view, is successful in getting medicines out there. What we do not know is the clinical impact this has had. We are making an assumption that we are helping to close the gap by having this program in place, but we cannot really say that it is. So the committee made a recommendation that the government undertake an evaluation to ascertain whether the increased supply of PBS medicines provided by the program is having a clinical impact on the health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote communities. I personally think that is a particularly important recommendation.

We have also made a recommendation about ensuring accurate and legible labelling on medicines. What we are finding is that some of these medicines are going out with handwritten labels, for example, and there is concern around that. So we have made a recommendation about ensuring that there is a universal system in place to provide for accurate and legible labelling and recording of medicines. The evidence given to us indicated that the Aboriginal health services needed more access to pharmacists in-house. Where we see pharmacists in-house in Aboriginal health services, we are seeing much better quality use of medicines. What we are trying to ensure here is quality use of medicines so we have good clinical outcomes. So there is a recommendation that various mechanisms be looked at in terms of enabling Aboriginal health services to have pharmacists in-house. There is also a recommendation about dose administration aids. At the moment, if they are funded under the scheme, they have to be funded out of the money for medications, and of course we want to see that money being used for medications. So we believe these aids need to be used. There was good evidence supplied to us that showed the effectiveness of using those particular aids.

There is also a recommendation around integrating some of the programs. There are a number of programs about increasing the supply of medications but also looking at the better quality use of medications. So we are recommending that there be a review, not to review the programs per se but to bring about better integration of some of those programs, because we established that there are some gaps in the supply of medications—for example, to aged-care facilities. It is unclear whether these people can access medications through this particular program.

I will conclude there because I know there are other senators who want to speak on this matter. I commend these recommendations to the government. I for one can tell the government and put them on notice that I will be pursuing the implementation of these recommendations, and I am sure no-one would expect any less.