NSW is set to join Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT in implementing a real-time prescription medicine monitoring system (RTPM).
A spokesperson for NSW Health Minister, Brad Hazzard, told Pharmacy Daily that "work is already underway" to develop an RTPM for the state.
With NSW joining the push for RTPM, Western Australia is the only state yet to indicate it will implement a system to tackle doctor shopping
News that the state will introduce real-time monitoring comes less than a month after Hazzard's colleague Rob Stokes, NSW Minister for Planning and Public Spaces, raised the issue in an address to the state's Legislative Assembly.
Stokes said he had been alerted to the need for an RTPM by a family in his Pittwater constituency, whose daughter died on 16 May after an overdose.
He told the Assembly that the deceased woman, Rachael Brown, had developed an addiction to prescription sleeping pills after her father had been severely injured 12 years ago.
As her addiction spiralled out of control she would travel around the Northern Beaches and Sydney to obtain scripts from GPs who were unaware of her addiction, and then visit pharmacies to have the prescriptions filled.
Stokes said Brown's mother, Cheryl, "would visit the GPs and the pharmacies asking for them to voluntarily share with her whether Rachael sought prescriptions from them, as any concerned mother would earnestly do".
"Some would, some would not on the grounds of patient confidentiality," he said
"Cheryl told me that a couple of pharmacies would call her when she was at her wits' end saying, 'Rachael is here now' so she knew where her daughter was and could go to collect her."
A number of state coroners across the country have called to the implementation of RTPM "ideally as part of a national system", to combat the rise of prescription-drug-related deaths (PD 27 Jun), while Pharmaceutical Society of Australia NSW Branch President, Peter Carroll, had expressed disappointment that the State Government had not found funding for real-time monitoring in the Budget (PD 19 Jun).
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