Medicinal cannabis compliance
In recent years, the rise of certain medicinal cannabis business models has led to some concerning practices around compliance with state and federal legislation.
Your Guild has been in communications with Queensland Health regarding concerns around inappropriate or excessive prescribing and dispensing of medicinal cannabis. This includes issues such as:
- multiple products per script;
- inappropriate dispensing intervals;
- illegal compounding and substitution;
- product registrations;
- channelling;
- storage of Schedule 8 medicines;
- prescription compliance;
- SAS; and
- state dispensing requirements as per Medicine & Poisons Regulations, including withholding documents required for dispensing.
Your Guild is calling you to action to ensure regulatory compliance of all health professionals to help avoid the risk of devaluing our profession. We need you to be the catalyst of change. Protect your staff, your business, and, ultimately, your patients by ensuring those who have taken advantage of our highly trusted profession are scrutinized to the same standards that we hold ourselves to.
How to report your concerns
Queensland Health has advised that should pharmacists have specific concerns with examples of such behaviours in the course of their daily practice, they should complete an online General Report which will be assessed, and investigated, if necessary, by the Queensland Health Medicines Compliance team. I would strongly encourage you to complete a report with all available evidence for all occasions you see this occurring.
Further to this, should you have particular concerns about the practice of another health practitioner, it is recommended that you consider whether to make a notification to the Office of the Health Ombudsman (OHO) under their mandatory reporting requirements under the national law. This includes channelling or vertical integration where documents are withheld.
If your concern is of a promotional or advertising nature, such as social media or in store signage, you can direct your complaint to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).
If you have another type of complaint or don’t know where it fits, please email it to your Guild Business Support team and we will respond to you with next steps.
Thank you for your diligence and support in ensuring pharmacists are able to confidently and safely practise within the medicinal cannabis space.