City PBS prescription rates double those in very remote areas

New data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has highlighted an ongoing disparity in accessing medications for people in regional and remote areas, leading to calls for all governments to incentivise more GPs to get out to underserviced communities.
 
Although the data shows that Australians have had a similar number of medications dispensed via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) over the last 10 years, and that Federal Government spending on prescription medicines has increased in that time, it reveals that people in remote and very remote areas are accessing scripts at an alarmingly lower rate than their inner-city counterparts.
 
According to the latest AIHW report, based on PBS prescription rates for 2023, inner regional and outer regional areas had the highest annual PBS prescription rates – at an average of 15.8 and 14.3 per person per year, respectively.
 
Comparatively, remote and very remote areas had averages of 9.6 and 5.7 per person per year.
 
Those areas also had the lowest annual PBS expenditure, at $307 and $476 per person against the national average of $642.
 
The AIHW says these rates have remained relatively stable over time.
 
This is despite national reports showing that regional and remote areas in Australia have the highest levels of cancer and potentially avoidable deaths, and hospitalisations are up to three times higher.
 
RACGP Rural Deputy Chair Dr Rod Omond, who works in remote healthcare in the Northern Territory, told newsGP the data indicates that not enough doctors are able to go out to these communities.
 
‘The lack of access to doctors, and particularly GPs, means that the more remote you go, the less likely people are to be on their regular preventive and chronic disease medications because they just can’t obtain them,’ he said.
 
It is an ongoing problem, Dr Omond says, that is leading to people becoming sick and dying prematurely.
 
‘If people are not on preventive types of medications, like statins for high cholesterol, then it increases the rate of incidents like strokes and heart attacks later in life, so they end up becoming sick sooner, or dying sooner, or getting debilitating illnesses and having to live with the effects of that,’ he said.
 
The lack of doctors in regional Australia has been labelled an existential crisis, with the Federal Government announcing a landmark review last year to address the ‘uneven spread’ of GPs.
 
The Working Better for Medicare Review was scheduled to conclude as of July this year, but no findings or recommendations have been announced.
 
Dr Omond says state governments need to act now to support GPs to get into regional and remote areas.
 
‘There’s a whole range of things that need to happen to encourage GPs to go and be able to go and take their families into the rural sector, where it often costs more to live,’ he said.
 
‘There needs to be extra funding to help, as there is in Victoria and Queensland, but not in the other states.’
 
Furthermore, Dr Omond added that there needs to be an impetus to train more rural GPs, above the existing quota, and that the Federal Government needs to step in to help with support programs that are currently untouched.
 
‘The RACGP Fellowship support program is not funded at all, it’s self-funded,’ he said.
 
‘That’s a rural GP training program, and yet the Federal Government are not funding it.
 
‘There are a number of things that the Government could do to assist that process and it’s not going to be an easy answer or a short-term answer, but it needs to happen.’
 
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PBS Pharmecuetical Benefits Scheme regional remote rural healthcare