“Don’t import NZ medicines system,” warns Medicines Australia

Speaking at a Medicines New Zealand conference in Auckland today (October 9), pharma trade group Medicines Australia chief executive Brendan Shaw said that Australia should avoid adopting the New Zealand model of medicines funding.

“While New Zealand has exported many good things to Australia, its system of funding medicines should not be one of them,” Dr Shaw said, adding: “One of our great concerns in Australia is that this reverence by a handful of academics for the New Zealand model has been entirely myopic, focussing only on cost and not on the full package of what the PHARMAC [New Zealand’s pharmaceutical management agency] model brings. Looking only at the costs without considering the whole system is poor policy development.”

Dr Shaw highlighted some characteristics of the New Zealand model that had escaped attention in the Australian medicines policy debate, including: