The Pharmacy Guild of Australia and the Australian Medical Association have both recently expressed concerns about public hospitals including Emergency Departments being stretched, but have taken very different stances on how the problem could be solved.

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s Queensland President Chris Owen has said that “If community pharmacists and other primary health care professionals could practice to their full scope, then the incidence and management of chronic diseases could be better managed, preventable hospitalisations and non-urgent Emergency Department (ED) presentations reduced, and better health outcomes delivered for Queenslanders.”

Mr Owen also said “Some of the ED demand is often for conditions that could have been prevented or better managed within a local primary healthcare setting” and that “Increasing qualified pharmacist’s scope of practice will not only provide better local primary health care, but will save the Queensland public health care system an estimated $1,302m from non-urgent emergency department presentations over 20 years.”

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia has also cited that on average every person visits their community pharmacy 18 times each year, in metropolitan, rural and remote locations in Queensland. They are supporting a Full Scope of Practice Trial for community pharmacists in North Queensland, where community pharmacists participating in the trial would undertake additional University supervised education and training.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has launched “Clear the hospital logjam”, a campaign to reform the way public hospitals are funded and make hospitals a vote-changing federal election issue.

According to the AMA, Clear the hospital logjam explains how ambulance ramping, emergency waiting times and delays in elective surgery are all part of a cycle of underfunding and poor planning that is putting pressure on hospitals across the nation and which are buckling under the extra strain of the pandemic.

“The long-standing public hospital funding failure is so serious we can no longer allow this issue to be punted between state and federal governments, it’s a national issue. Australians are in danger of losing their access to universal healthcare and that’s a tragedy we can’t allow,” AMA President Dr Omar Khorshid said.

“The only way we will ever resolve this problem is to fundamentally change the way governments fund public hospitals and it needs to happen now,” Dr Khorshid said.

“We know that on the ground our hospitals are hurting – they were under pressure even before the pandemic. Supporting hospitals is critical along with our hard-working GPs who can prevent disease and keep Australians well and out of hospital in the first place,” Dr Khorshid said.

According to Dr Khorshid, “Australians are sick of state and federal politicians blaming each other for inadequate hospital funding and so we are encouraging all Australians to elect candidates who understand the current funding arrangements are broken, and who are willing to go to Canberra to change them.”

The AMA also released the hospital chapter of its Pre-Budget Submission, providing the figure of $20.5 billion across four years to create a more equitable 50-50 funding share between the Commonwealth and states and territories, and to remove the existing 6.5% cap on funding growth. It also calls for additional partnership hospital funding to be provided to improve performance, expand capacity, and address avoidable admissions.