Tuesday, 18 March 2025

Veterinary care

Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (00:12): (1511) My adjournment matter this evening is for the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is for the minister to advise me on what action she is taking to enable access to e-prescribing for veterinarians. Thanks to the Victorian pet census report, we now know there are 4.3 million pets in Victoria that all need vet care at some stage of their lives, and some regularly. A visit to the vet, much like dealing with a doctor, is a process that can be a stressful, expensive and time-consuming endeavour. During the COVID pandemic Australia broadly adopted the use of many technology innovations and digital approaches to reduce face-to-face contact. We have kept many of these innovations around, including e-prescriptions, because they are convenient, are easier to use and get medicines to patients faster.

However, largely due to a technicality, e-prescriptions for vet practitioners are not currently allowed. The Secretary of the Department of Health under the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Act 1981 has powers to approve new prescription methods. There are thousands of vets across Victoria that would prefer to use e-prescriptions if they had the opportunity to do so, and Dr Julia Malcolm is just one of those vets. She runs a mobile vet clinic in regional Victoria. Dr Malcolm helps hundreds of Victorians deal with the complexities of rural pet ownership, things that people in my electorate know all too well, including limited mobility, geographic isolation, physical barriers and time constraints, by providing stress-free vet care right at home. Whilst Dr Malcolm provides comprehensive care to hundreds of pets, she is still required to have printed prescriptions mailed to pharmacies so that they can dispense life-saving medication for pets.

There is a technology platform that already exists that could solve this problem and greatly improve the ease of access to medications for our pets. They simply need the government to authorise the use of e-prescriptions by vets under existing legislation. The regulation-making powers in the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Act already exist to authorise the making of regulations to allow vets to issue electronic prescriptions. We are calling on the secretary to approve alternative means of writing prescriptions for vets, like those for doctors, and to publish the approval in the Government Gazette for it to come into force. I hope the minister can action my ask to fix this oversight, enable e-prescribing for veterinarians here in Victoria and improve access to vet care across the state.