Dr Elisabeth Wearne: Problems with multiple medicines (II)
Listen to patients and health professionals speak about their experience with taking multiple medicines.
Dr Elisabeth Wearne
Main occupation: General practitioner
Years in clinical practice: 7
Qualifications: MBBS, FRACGP
Dr Elisabeth Wearne, GP, works in rural and remote areas. She describes some of the problems with accessing medicines in these areas and what the local pharmacies can do to help.
Access ... access can be a problem remotely. So, for example, in [place], where I work, we have a depot for one of the larger pharmacies down in [place] and medications are sent up each day on the bus. There's often a 24- to 48-hour turnaround for patients being able to get their medications, but what happens, I think, is that we work pretty closely with the pharmacies and they tend to be a little bit more flexible in being able to provide two or three days' worth of medications for someone, if they've forgotten to come and get a renewed script.
That, in some ways, can be a problem, particularly for people who are using a lot of dangerous medications, who perhaps are misusing them or over-using them, but again, it's a small community; we talk to each other. Patients and the doctor tend to have a different relationship up in a place like that. So, you can actually often get to the bottom of that a lot more easily.
The Living with multiple medicines project was developed in
collaboration with Healthtalk Australia.