February 2025
News
In this issue
| Update to Continued Dispensing Arrangements – Emergency Measures |
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| Disabling or re-enabling Electronic prescriptions |
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| Reminder: Western Australia S8 and S4 drugs require patient's date of birth |
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| Reminder: Services Australia PRODA B2B Device expiry |
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| This Month's PBS Changes |
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| Running the monthly update for Fred Dispense |
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Update to Continued Dispensing Arrangements – Emergency Measures
From 4 February 2025 to 31 March 2025, a temporary PBS Continued Dispensing Emergency Measure has been put in place to support people affected by the flooding disaster in Far North Queensland to continue to access their PBS subsidised medicines.
This PBS Continued Dispensing Emergency Measure will support access to a wider range of PBS medicines than under ongoing Continued Dispensing arrangements, covering most medicines on the General Schedule of the PBS. For further information, please see the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme Continued Dispensing Arrangements webpage.
The 5 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 and select the ‘A2022CD or other emergency code’ checkbox.
For continued dispensing related queries please refer to the link above. If you have any other questions, refer to Dispense a Continued Dispensing Supply or contact Fred Help.
Disabling or re-enabling Electronic prescriptions
In the event of potential clinical risks with dispensing and supplying an ePrescription, you are reminded that you can disable an ePrescription in Fred Dispense.
This is particularly important if the patient is a doctor shopper or you suspect the prescription may be fraudulent.
For step-by-step instructions, see Disable or re-enable an ePrescription.
Reminder: Western Australia S8 and S4 drugs require patient's date of birth
In the February Fred Dispense update, pharmacists must record the patient's date of birth for all S8 and S4 drugs.
Fred Dispense now prompts for date of birth when an S8 or S4 drug is dispensed in Western Australia. See Providing Date of Birth when Dispensing S8 Drugs for more details.
Reminder: Services Australia PRODA B2B Device expiry
To avoid disruption to your Services Australia PBS Online claiming, you’ll need to extend your B2B Device in your PRODA account before it expires.
You’ll need to extend your B2B device with PRODA at least every 6 months.
Fred Dispense will warn you of the impending expiry at the following time intervals:
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30 days from expiry
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14 days from expiry
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Every day from 7 days to the expiry day.
For more information on how to do this, refer to: Managing B2B Devices in PRODA - PRODA (Provider Digital Access) on the Services Australia website or call Services Australia on 1800 700 199.
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.
For Highly Specialised Drugs (HSD) items (CAR and non-CAR), please refer to the Schedule of Pharmaceutical Benefits as well as Services Australia to confirm whether the PBS item code for a HSD is eligible to be dispensed and claimed by your pharmacy type.