The recent budget revealed a ‘redesign’ for stewarding the quality use of medicines, with major implications for NPS...
Professor Mark Morgan is a member of the NPS MedicineInsight GP Advisory Group and Chair of the RACGP Expert Committee – Quality Care, which plays a pivotal role in creating and endorsing clinical practice guidelines.
He told newsGP that change brings potential risks and should not be undertaken as a cost-cutting exercise.
‘I am concerned that years of experience and knowledge that is held by NPS will be lost in any transfer of roles to another organisation,’ Professor Morgan said.
‘QUM should not be about saving dollars.
‘It should be about ensuring the right care to the right person at the right time. It should be about high-value care and not about lower cost care.’
Providing resources and support for QUM should be continuously evaluated, according to Professor Morgan, and programs should not be about managing the performance of individual GPs.
He also warned against creating scenarios where doctors are uncertain about exercising careful clinical judgement.
‘QUM programs should leave room for patient-centred individualised approaches in specific circumstances,’ he said.
‘[They] should focus on providing supportive resources, assisting reflective practice and providing unbiased evidence-based information.’
Professor Morgan highlighted the need for general practice QUM programs to cater to an environment which includes ‘many patients with multimorbidity and interacting biopsychosocial factors’.
‘GPs who understand this need to be at the centre of QUM program design and implementation,’ he said.
Quality use of medicines
General practice
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