Doctors making four million calls to the authority script line every year — but how many requests are rejected?
Despite the calls, the number of rejections to prescribe are low, says an audit office report.
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.
