Govt Wastes 1.3 Million GP Consultations
Australian GPs are forced to sit on the phone waiting for Medicare's permission to prescribe certain medicines, wasting the equivalent of an astounding 1.3 million patient consultations every year, the AMA revealed today.
The government should immediately scrap the outdated, bureaucratic system of authority prescribing, AMA President Dr Mukesh Haikerwal said.
"An AMA analysis of government data has revealed that the equivalent of 240 full-time doctors spend their whole year on the telephone waiting for Medicare Australia to approve authority prescriptions," Dr Haikerwal said.
"That's the equivalent of 1.3 million patient consultations lost each year because of administrative red tape.
"This is a waste of scarce resources and expertise. To tie up so much time keeping doctors on hold to Medicare is an unnecessary diversion from the key task of patient care."
Doctors are required to obtain authority prescriptions when the medication they want to prescribe has special requirements associated with its use.
An authority prescription must have a Medicare-issued authority number and a phone approval number or stamp before it can be filled by a pharmacist.
More than 420 medicines currently require authority approval, including commonly-prescribed cancer, diet and pain-killing drugs.
The Taskforce on Reducing Regulatory Burdens in Business reported that in 2004/05, about 6.3 million authority approvals were requested. 99.98 per cent of those were granted.
"The Taskforce very sensibly recommended scrapping authority requirements for repeat prescriptions and Medicare itself trialled an online authority prescription system in 2000 but failed to pursue it further," Dr Haikerwal said.
"Why was this not pursued?
"Why not remove some of the unnecessary red tape and allow doctors to get on with better patient care and health outcomes?
"We challenge the government to commit to quality healthcare and prescribing by doing away with this archaic and obstructive system."
ESTIMATES OF THE WORKFORCE IMPLICATIONS OF PBS AUTHORITY SCRIPTS
The number of PBS authority scripts, 2004/05:
Total 6,300,000
By telephone 5,400,000
In writing 900,000
Doctor time taken per PBS authority script:
By telephone 3.3 minutes
In writing 9.5 minutes
Total doctor time taken (annual hours) = clinical hours lost:
By telephone 297,000
In writing 142,500
By all means 439,500
Potential number of patient consultations lost per annum: 1,318,500
Assuming each full-time equivalent (FTE) doctor (40 hour week, 46 week year) works 1,840 hours in a year, the cost of PBS authority scripts in terms of FTE doctors: 239
- Access Economics