PHARMACY Guild of Australia executive director David Quilty has said the Guild strongly supports the Minister for Health's indication of a committment to the introduction of a real time recording system for controlled drugs to reduce fatalities from prescription drug abuse.
With coroners around the country calling for such a recording system, a Fairfax Media report suggests next month's budget may include the adoption of an Electronic Recording and Reporting of Controlled Drugs (ERRCD) system, although Minister Greg Hunt would not comment on what the budget may hold.
"I look forward to ensuring the electronic prescription system ... is acted on in my first six months," he said.
The Guild, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia (PSA) are all applying pressure on the government to provide urgent funds to help states and territories fully implement the ERRCD system, in a bid to curb the consistently swelling number of overdose deaths from abuse of prescription medicines.
While fatal overdoses on the mainland continue to escalate, Tasmania, which implemented an ERRCD in 2012, has managed to reduce prescription-drug related deaths by more than 30%, the Telegraph reports.
Similarly, since 2012 in the United States of America, New York's version of ERRCD has successfully reduced prescription medicine doctor shopping by around 75%.
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