Page 1370 - Week 04 - Thursday, 4 April 2019
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monitoring. As we know, across Australia there is a growing problem with the misuse and abuse of prescription medicine. We are committed to minimising harms caused by this.
Today I am pleased to provide an update on what members may have seen recently, which is that health professionals now have access to essential information about their patients’ use of controlled medicines to assist them in identifying and reducing potential harms for their patients and, in turn, for the broader community.
Through the ACT government’s secure online prescription monitoring website, known as DORA, practitioners can now identify potential cases of doctor shopping, help to minimise other risks associated with the prescribing of controlled medicines, and help health professionals, particularly doctors and pharmacists, to identify unusual patterns of use for controlled medicines, patterns which could suggest a risk of harm to their patient or to the broader community.
I am delighted that the ACT is the first jurisdiction to have made this level of progress towards real-time monitoring, and feedback from a wide range of stakeholders has been very supportive. DORA is available to all registered prescribers, which includes doctors, dentists and nurse practitioners, as well as pharmacists, to support ACT patient care.
Within weeks of this program going live, 61 practitioners had already registered for access to commence use of the system as a new and very important part of delivering high quality patient care for all Canberrans.
MS CODY: Minister, can you outline how this system minimises the harms associated with misuse of prescription drugs?
MS FITZHARRIS: This means that ACT health practitioners are now able to find essential information about their patients’ use of controlled medicines, which provides an extra level of protection for patients. DORA provides access to information about controlled medicines that represent the greatest risk of abuse, misuse and diversion, including strong opioid medicines such as morphine and oxycodone which can be used to control severe pain, and stimulant medicines such as dexamphetamine which can often be used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
In the previous financial year 2017-18 the health protection service sent approximately 2,400 monitoring letters to prescribers in response to alerts generated by its drugs and poisons information system, or DPIS, the precursor to DORA. Whilst effective at detecting misuse this system does not give health professionals access to their patients’ dispensing history before making the decision to prescribe or dispense a controlled medicine. DORA now enables that to occur.
This complements other safeguards the ACT already has in place to help protect the public from potential harms arising from the abuse and misuse of controlled medicines in the community, including the requirement for prescribers to apply to the Chief Health Officer for approval to prescribe a controlled medicine for their patients
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