February 2020
News
In this issue
Emergency Arrangements for Patients Affected by Bushfires
On 10 January 2020 the Health Minister made an announcement to ensure that patients affected by the bushfires will be able to access their regular medications under the PBS, conditional upon changes to state legislation.
Effective Monday 13 Jan 2020 until 31 March 2020 the Department of Health have expanded the list of PBS drugs that can be supplied via continued dispensing provisions.
- The expanded list includes all Section 85 PBS authority and non-authority items
- This applies to most medicines generally supplied by community pharmacies
- S100 items are NOT to be supplied under these arrangements.
- The normal Continued Dispensing PBS rules apply
The February Fred Dispense drug file has been updated with the expanded list. When dispensing eligible authority items, please remember to use 123 as the authority number.
For continued dispensing related queries please refer to the link above. If you have any other questions, please contact Fred Help.
SafeScript and Fred Dispense for Victorian Pharmacies
SafeScript real-time prescription monitoring system is already saving lives and keeping patients with prescription medication addictions safe from harm.
From April 2020, it will be mandatory to check SafeScript prior to writing or dispensing a prescription for a medicine monitored through the system. For more information, refer to SafeScript on the health.vic website.
Get Started with SafeScript
1. Register
Victorian pharmacies wishing to use SafeScript must first register with the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services
2. Activate
Once the registration process is complete, activate SafeScript in Fred Dispense.
- Go to Setup > eHealth Configuration > SafeScript Configuration.
- Select Activate SafeScript.
- Click Save.
3. Dispense
- When you dispense S8 or Victorian monitored drugs, you must enter the patient's Date of Birth.
- SafeScript returns a notification when you navigate to the Pharmacist initials field.
For more information, refer to SafeScript in Fred Dispense.
SafeScript and Fred Dispense in Victorian Hospitals
In preparation for state wide rollout, Victorian pharmacies providing services to hospitals (specifically inpatient) will be able to flag a script as being dispensed as an inpatient script with the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+I. See Dispense a script for an inpatient for more details.
This information is important for future rules to be implemented in SafeScript. All monitored drug dispensing history is forwarded to SafeScript with this inpatient information included.
This Month's PBS Changes
For the full Schedule of Pharmaceutical Benefits, go to the PBS website at http://www.pbs.gov.au/ where you can search the schedule by drug name.
For your convenience, we've also uploaded a printable summary of this month's important PBS changes to this site:
Please note that the Government provides this information under embargo to Fred IT Group to enable next month’s PBS changes to be incorporated into your drug file. We have provided this information in this newsletter to prepare you for the changes, maximising patient availability/access and enabling you to adjust your stock accordingly. A condition of the embargo and in the interests of the quality use of medicines is that the information must not be released to the public or otherwise distributed prior to 1 February 2020.