

News

President’s Blog: Word in the ear to Government: Patient safety our primary concern
Friday July 25, 2025

It appears that pharmacists are going to have greater responsibility for patient care after the Government’s announcement on the opening of applications for the Enhanced Access Community Pharmacy Pilot (EACPP).
We were already aware of the 12-month training program for pharmacists to treat a range of conditions. This had previously included urinary tract infections, resupply of oral contraceptive pills, and pharmacist-administered vaccinations. To this were added ear infections, acne and asthma.
It attracted significant media attention, as I discovered when I fronted up to the assembled camera people and journalists at the AMA (WA). They were rightly interested in what the changing face of pharmacy care might entail.
The long-held check and balance of separating prescribing from dispensing no longer applies with such changes, and this means the usual oversight about medication reconciliation, where you need another ‘pair of eyes’, has gone.
Patient safety is our first priority. Cases will inevitably fall through the cracks under this new model because, frankly, people are complex and health presentations are complex. Doctors spend years of study prior to joining the profession, then many more to understand their patients better, while pharmacists are being invited to a 12-month program. Patients will front up to GP clinics and EDs for assistance when their initial consultation with a pharmacist is unsatisfactory. Nor do we know how much it will cost the community, given pharmacies will set the prices for such services.
The AMA (WA) has lobbied the Government for adverse outcome monitoring and mandatory pharmacist-GP communication, and will continue to do so. We want to ensure that the EACPP is rolled out safely when it is due to begin service delivery by 2027, that it’s for appropriate indications, that we have the right checks and balances, that we have ways of tracking when things go wrong and that there isn’t further fragmentation from this.
Pharmacists play an important role in dispensing and giving advice on medicines but they are not trained to diagnose patients. This is not a ‘turf war’ with pharmacists, as some have portrayed it.
It might feel like a war for our hard-working GPs and hospital doctors right now, given we are in the grip of a horror flu season, and July is traditionally the peak month for ramping. Indeed, hours outside hospitals are banking up at a rate of more than 200 a day, so we will have around 6,500 hours accumulated this month.
We know vaccination has had about a 2% improvement recently and sits at about 25% but we need to do far better to prevent the significant presentations we are having. We strongly encourage all our GPs and doctors in all settings to make sure their patients and the community in general is well informed on the benefits of vaccination. We thank all our doctors for their service to the community, including many of our doctors in training, who are bearing the brunt of what would feel like endless presentations this flu season.