Page 49 - Retail Pharmacy November/Decemeber 2020

48 ANNUAL REPORT A DATA DEMONSTRATION OF COMMUNITY PHARMACY’S VALUE TPhilip Chindamo, Group Executive, Health Economics and Chief Economist, Pharmacy Guild of Australia his year has been unprecedented and challenging for everyone, due to the unforeseen Covid-19 pandemic. Community pharmacy, as an essential service, has uniquely been at the forefront of experiencing and helping to tackle the immediate impact of Covid-19. Its importance to patients as well as the resilience of the community pharmacy network has been highlighted in 2020. Despite the challenges posed by Covid-19, the experience this year highlights the opportunities to further utilise community pharmacies beyond 2020 for the benefit of patients and the wider health system. A shock on many levels The loss of life, ongoing health conditions and curtailing of Australians’ expected way of life due to Covid-19 cannot be understated. The economic shock has also been pronounced, with the federal government describing this period as the most severe global economic challenge since the Great Depression. Australia experienced its first recession in 30 years, with unemployment topping the one million mark and Australia’s economy contracting by seven per cent in the three months to June 2020, with a 3.75 per cent fall expected for this calendar year. Households quickly retreated from spending on many goods and services, primarily due to uncertainty around employment and income growth. Some estimates suggest Australians saved 20 per cent of their income in the June quarter alone. Consumer price inflation fell by 1.9 per cent in the June quarter of 2020, relative to the previous year. What remained of consumer spending during the onset of the pandemic quickly switched to online, given the restrictions posed by Covid-19. For example, online retail sales growth averaged 80 per cent in the three months to August. Community pharmacies haven’t been immune to the economic pain, but have also shown resilience. Comparative data from various sources, such as GuildData, demonstrates the unprecedented nature of 2020 for community pharmacy. Dispensing prescriptions Compared with previous years, Covid-19 has caused unanticipated surges and volatility in the volumes of prescriptions dispensed. There is no historical comparison to the dispensing experience of, particularly, the first half of 2020. During March 2020 alone, community pharmacies dispensed 30.7 million medicines. This is a 23 per cent increase compared with the same month last year and the highest monthly number of prescriptions dispensed on record. On average this is about 5400 prescriptions per pharmacy for the month. Chart 1 shows this unanticipated spike in dispensing activity. The chart shows the only comparable spike in dispensing in recent years is December 2015, when there were 29.6 million prescriptions dispensed. The difference is that the heightened volume in December each year is anticipated because it’s associated with patients reaching their safety net thresholds by the end of their calendar year, and hence more prescriptions are dispensed. Further to this, the December 2015 peak was exacerbated by stockpiling of Panadol Osteo among other OTC items that were scheduled for delisting or tightened restrictions in January 2016. The decision to delist or tighten restrictions on these items was made by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee as far back as July 2015. In other words, community pharmacists anticipate and can plan for the regular December peak, whereas March 2020 was unanticipated. This meant that the network had to be even more agile in 2020: additional staffing and hours were needed to meet the unforeseen spike in demand. Issues such as medicine and other shortages became paramount considerations for patients and community pharmacies alike, as did the flexibility for community pharmacies to roster staff to meet peak demand. Just as the March 2020 period was unprecedented, the network was also not certain as to what the short-term trend in dispensing activity would be from March 2020 onwards. Would the March experience become the ‘new normal’? Well, the opposite occurred: RETAIL PHARMACY • NOV/DEC 2020