Letter to editor – rural scene
April 14, 2014
Referring to Joe Lamhut’s
letter (PD 07 Apr), a rural
pharmacist writes:
What’s suggested by the letter
is what we hear and read by many
commentators on the effect of the
recent cuts; that is compensating
the cuts through attracting more
revenues by the customers, let it be
through increasing prices (called
improving profit margins in the
letter) charging for existing and
new services.
I’m working in a rural pharmacy
and I can tell you: that is not
possible.
More than 90% of the pharmacy
income is driven by concession
subsidised PBS scripts. The below
than average socioeconomics
of such areas make customers
struggle to afford even their
subsidised medications.
As for using technology to connect
to customers more readily, ... many
of our customers wouldn’t have
network coverage, and the elderly
were not able to respond to the
messages.
However, pharmacies in rural
areas are dealing with a highly
vulnerable group, where age,
prevalence of diabetes and related
CVD are above the average.
With the forthcoming PBS cuts,
and irrelevance of ‘extracting’
more money of our customers
to compensate these cuts, many
rural pharmacies would be lucky
to escape with just some staff
cuts. Unless we are happy to leave
it up to the market and let these
pharmacies go unviable.
I hope the answer is no.
Otherwise, we are risking having
highly vulnerable group of patients
with no timely access for their
medications, which would put them
at higher risk of hospitalisation.
And I thought that PBS cuts were
all about saving taxpayers’ money.
[Edited for space and name
withheld by request.]
We welcome any comments;
to weigh in on this or any other
subject, email us at
info@pharmacydaily.com.au.
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