Practice pharmacists offer new opportunities for team care
Brisbane South PHN is collaborating to embed pharmacists within general practice. With new opportunities for team care, our goal is to improve consumer health care through additional, specialist expertise; create time efficiencies for GPs and Nurses; engage pharmacists in diverse work that allows ongoing follow-up; plus opportunities to learn across disciplines.
‘Our Practice Pharmacist Initiative supports person-centred, high quality, integrated primary health care in the region,’ explained Nicolette Ellis, Pharmacist and Program Manager, Pharmacy Health Integration, Brisbane South PHN.
‘We aim to deliver higher quality of care to consumers by reducing serious, medicine-related health problems in primary care settings through team and place-based models of care.’
With more than 400,000 people presenting to hospital emergency departments in Australia each year because of serious medicine-related problems, we know that up to 250,000 of these are completely preventable (University of Queensland, 2023).
‘With our partners we believe that we can bring that number down for our region,’ said Nicolette.