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- Evidence-Based Medicine
- Health Care Quality, Access, and Evaluation
- Inappropriate Prescribing
- Primary Health Care
- Pharmacy
Public payment for medicines is key to equity of access, as are reimbursement decisions aligned with genuine therapeutic advantage. To optimise benefits and minimise harm, support for rational medicine use (called ‘quality use of medicines’ in Australia) is also needed. Australia’s independent National Prescribing Service (‘NPS MedicineWise’ or NPS) was set up in 1998 to support quality use of medicines as a key component of Australia’s National Medicines Policy. After nearly 25 years of delivering high-quality services to improve the use of medicines, NPS’ board announced in September that it will close at the end of 2022 due to loss of government funding.
Why this happened remains unclear. The first inkling was a review by Professor Lloyd Sansom commissioned by the Australian Department of Health.1 The largely supportive report highlighted: ‘almost universal acknowledgement that NPS MedicineWise produces high quality resources’ and ‘a general consensus of support for the work of the organisation’. The report identified some areas …
Footnotes
Competing interests None declared. Refer to the online supplementary files to view the ICMJE form(s).
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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