We aimed to continue our close, positive, trusted working relationship with government and seek Ministerial recognition that community pharmacy has a vital and growing role to help deliver what the government wants – more timely access to quality healthcare, improved health outcomes and getting better value for money from existing health funding.
Growing role of community pharmacy
We believe that community pharmacy can play an even greater role in primary healthcare, including further improving immunisation rates, helping to reduce ED waiting times, and taking pressure off stretched general practices and after hours/urgent care.
We recognise the significant fiscal challenges currently faced by the government and across our health system. This is why it’s so important to get better value-for-money from existing health funding, such as delivering an expanded range of more cost-effective services through community pharmacy with Health New Zealand (HNZ) “investing to save” in services such as acute minor health conditions faced everyday by New Zealanders (e.g. pain and fever, skin conditions, eye infections), long-term chronic condition medicine management services, and after-hours and urgent care.
We were pleased to hear the Minister’s want for best value for money access and improved health outcomes to be delivered from within available funding and also to learn more about how the community pharmacy sector is well positioned to help deliver on the governments priorities and how this can be progressed.
We were clear that our sector has ably demonstrated its ability to respond to new service growth challenges and can do more to help. Community pharmacy is a key part of the solution – and remains ready, willing and able to deliver what the government wants.
There is compelling evidence, both locally and internationally that demonstrates the economic merits of expanded service investment in community pharmacy. Community pharmacy services also represent better value for money for government (e.g. $25 for a pharmacy visit, versus $49 for a GP visit and $655 for an ED visit). This adds up to multi-million dollars savings very quickly. This would however require HNZ to reprioritise and repurpose existing funding.
While initial work is underway to explore investment in an expanded range of services by HNZ, we are not aware of any work yet being done to reprioritise and repurpose existing funding to get best value for money access and health outcomes.
We agreed to some concrete actions on how to progress this work and the Guild HQ team have already begun working with the key officials recommended to us by the Minister.
We also plan to use the Community Pharmacy Leaders Forum (CPLF), a group we facilitate and that consists of the leaders of national and local community pharmacy organisations, to progress and deliver on our service expansion discussions with the Minister.
One of CPLF’s two key priorities is advancing full scope of practice. Implementing full scope of practice will allow New Zealanders to see their pharmacy team for treatment of a broader range of conditions. CPLF recently committed to setting up a subgroup to advance this action.
Community pharmacy funding
We also raised the financial sustainability of community pharmacies, and the issues experienced in last year’s national annual agreement review (NAAR) process of our funding contract, the Integrated Community Pharmacy Services Agreement (ICPSA).
We noted that HNZ has not engaged in good faith and had adopted an unfair and inconsistent approach in 2024 to the consideration and recognition of reasonable cost pressures, and that this is causing considerable and avoidable angst in the community pharmacy sector.
We further noted our detailed review of the 2024 contracting process, including HNZ’s breach of ICPSA requirements to consider our sector’s reasonable cost pressures, and that HNZ has now backtracked on its commitment to complete a sustainable funding model review for community pharmacy by June 2025 after many years of similar broken promises.
We asked the Minister to support us in addressing this.
Next steps
The meeting was a very positive start to our relationship. The Minister had read our February briefing advice, on which the discussion was based, and agreed to meet with us again. We look forward to growing our relationship and working with the Minister to advance members interests.
Kesh Naidoo-Rauf
President, Pharmacy Guild of New Zealand
