INTHEBLACK February 2025 - Magazine - Page 37
“Our relationships with our patients are timeless. People want connection,
and community pharmacy is essential to providing that connection.”
BRENDAN O’LOUGHLIN, O’LOUGHLIN’S MEDICAL PHARMACY
of the revenue of most community
pharmacies comes from the PBS.
“There is a real lack of visibility in,
and understanding around, how payments
are calculated and how the money flows
in pharmacy,” says Topp, whose member
pharmacy Capital Chemist Southlands
in the ACT won the Pharmacy Guild of
Australia’s Pharmacy of the Year 2024 award.
Very roughly, pharmacies are paid weekly
for the prescriptions they dispensed the
previous week. For most prescriptions, until
recently at least, the pharmacy is paid
a dispensing fee and a handling fee.
For an affordable product, the customer
might pay the full cost of the medicine,
plus the pharmacist fee. For more expensive
products, the customer pays a patient
contribution, while the pharmacist fee
is paid and the rest of the cost is absorbed
by the PBS.
When 60-day prescriptions were
introduced by government in 2023, that was
a demonstration of the lack of understanding
of the system by policy makers, many
pharmacists argued.
A typical prescription might cover 30 days
of medication. The government’s new 60-day
prescription policy said patients could receive
two boxes of medication while the pharmacy
was paid just once.
Overnight, pharmacy revenues were
seriously threatened. It was the equivalent
of a fast-food restaurant being told to give
two burgers to every customer who paid
for one.
“Essentially, it halved our income,” says
Curtis Ruhnau, co-owner of Emerton
Amcal+ Pharmacy, winner of the Pharmacy
Guild of Australia’s Excellence in
Community Engagement and Excellence
in Harm Minimisation awards in 2024.
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