Hundreds of lives have potentially been saved across Ballarat and western Victoria in the first months of the government’s new SafeScript program.
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The $29.5m project, rolled out across western Victoria in October, has alerted doctors and pharmacists to almost 3300 patients at risk of harm or overdose from visiting multiple clinics or pharmacies.
At Ballarat’s UFS pharmacies, the real-time prescription monitoring system raises an orange or red warning flag several times an hour to alert pharmacists that a prescription has the potential to cause harm.
UFS head pharmacist Peter Fell said the first weeks of the scheme identified many ‘doctor shoppers’ who visit different GPs to get prescriptions for their drug of choice.
“Every time a GP or hospital prescribes drugs that are high risk or have high abuse potential, it goes in to a database and each time we have contact with a patient to dispense that script it goes in to the database,” Mr Fell said.
“A set of triggers in the database identifies patients at risk or patterns of potentially risky use and a green, orange or red flag pops up on the software,” he said.
The SafeScript program monitors Schedule 8 medicines such as morphine, oxycodone, codeine, diazepam, Stillnox, and many drugs used to treat anxiety.
Multiple prescribers, multiple pharmacies or high levels of strong painkillers may trigger a warning, prompting pharmacists to look in to the patient’s history and talk to them before deciding whether to dispense the medication.
As well as eradicating doctor shopping among those dependent on prescription medication, the system can also help identify developing addictions or potential black market use.
Mr Fell said recently a patient was “red flagged” and their prescription denied after they were found to be taking far more than the prescribed dose of dexamphetamine.
“The fact we refused it is recorded so if they take the prescription to another pharmacist they would have access to that record,” Mr Fell said.
More than 400 sites across the Western Victoria Primary Health Network, including Ballarat, Maryborough, Ararat and Stawell, are part of the SafeScript trial.
“It certainly adds to our workload because of the extra step in reviewing the patient history and speaking to the patient, but no pharmacist would refuse such a useful tool to make sure there is no misuse or misadventure,” he said.
There were 414 Victorian deaths from prescription medicine overdoses last year. Ballarat averaged 5.1 overdose deaths per 100,000 people each year between 2009-2016.
Accidental drug-related death in Australia is more than double the road toll and higher than death from heroin or illicit drug use.
The cutting-edge SafeScript system came online in Western Victoria at the start of October and will be rolled out across the state in April.
“We said SafeScript would save lives and that’s exactly what this cutting-edge program is doing. Prescription drug dependency can happen to anyone and the consequences can be tragic,” said health minister Jenny Mikakos.
“Now, health professionals can access real-time information about a patient’s prescription history – and discuss with them the risks of using dangerous amounts of prescription medication.”
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