PHARMACIES in regional areas need a restructure of the 8CPA Community Service Obligation (CSO) to help fund them to support their workforce and deliver services, says the Remote and Isolated Pharmacist Association Australia (RIPAA).
"We say that at least some CSO money would be better spent and accounted for if paid directly to the pharmacies it is intended to benefit," said a spokesperson from the RIPAA.
"A primary healthcare package aimed at targeting remote area health disadvantage and delivered through the existing network of one pharmacy towns in MM 4-7 and funded from a redesigned CSO would put the 'community service' back into the CSO."
According to a statement from the RIPAA, a pharmacy in an isolated area needs on average $150k each year to service their communities.
The body stated the existing rural allowances "fall well short" of what is actually required to provide non-dispensing primary healthcare services in rural and isolated towns.
Instead, it is the larger pharmacies that are benefitting from the discounts from the wholesalers who are currently being paid money from the CSO, added RIPAA.
"The CSO was established to ensure equitable access to PBS medicines but instead is allegedly underwriting incentives and inducements to larger pharmacies, franchises, groups, and chains to trade with them.
"This is fuelling the growth of corporate pharmacies, which was never intended to be a beneficiary of the CSO," explained the spokesperson for organisation.
"Smaller, more remote pharmacies are effectively double penalised, firstly by never being able to access the selective favourable CSO-supported trading terms offered to their closest and largest customers; and secondly because the CSO-supported rural supply network is still underfunded and brittle." JHM
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