Doctors making four million calls to the authority script line every year — but how many requests are rejected?

Doctors are making more than four million phone calls a year to the PBS authority script line despite the vast majority of requests being ticked off.
A recent Australian National Audit Office report examining the management of the PBS goes into some detail about the authority script system, which has long been seen as a bureaucratic nonsense that consumes time for no reason.
The report reveals that, in 2023-24, prescribers made 4.3 million calls to seek approval to prescribe a medicine on the PBS.
On top of this are a further 360,000 written requests and some 2.4 million requests made through the user-unfriendly Health Professional Online Services (HPOS) system.