Burying the hatchet

Simone Roberts

Addressing APP2008 delegates on Saturday, Catherine Argall, Medicare Australia chief executive, said Medicare would focus on working more closely with the pharmacy profession after learning from challenges during last year's roll-out of PBS Online.

"There is no doubt we had lots of challenges in 2004, 2005, 2006 and again last year throughout the very fast deployment of PBS Online. What we learned from this is consultation with pharmacy and other provider groups was simply not enough ... we needed to have a collaborative partnership where we co-defined and worked together to deliver outcomes that were going to meet your needs and the needs of Medicare Australia and the other big stakeholders. I think we can be jointly proud that we now have that collaborative relationship and that it saw us through the rough patches that inevitably occur in deployments such as this," she said.

Ms Argall said the dramatic uptake of the program was perhaps "too successful" for its own good. Ensuing difficulties saw many pharmacists frustrated, stressed and emotional. The most important lesson, Ms Argall said, was not to panic.

In the second half of last year Medicare Australia came under fire for its handling of the introduction of PBS Online after a series of outages, slow response times and errors. At the time Guild president Kos Sclavos lashed out at Medicare, saying it was "really stretching its friendship with the pharmacists of Australia".

Almost one year on, Mr Sclavos said the Guild and Medicare now met monthly to discuss issues or member complaints, which are now as low as six per month.