Pharmacy trial extended, but not due to success

The NSW pharmacy dermatology prescribing trial will be continuing for an additional six months, following lower than expected uptake.

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Pharmacists in NSW will continue prescribing for eczema, impetigo, shingles and psoriasis until at least August, after the trial failed to treat enough patients in its planned initial run.

The University of Newcastle has run three community pharmacist-led prescribing trials over the last few years; one for urinary tract infections, one for the oral contraceptive pill and one for minor dermatological ailments.  

The UTI trial was made permanent in May 2024, following “the successful completion” of a 12-month trial in which 18,000 women consulted a pharmacist with uncomplicated cystitis symptoms.

Around 3300 pharmacists participated in the UTI trial.

In September 2024, the contraceptive pill trial was labelled a “huge success” by Premier Chris Minns, again following a 12-month trial.

Roughly 2000 women consulted a pharmacist as part of this trial, across about 500 locations.

These two trials were both declared a success even though a detailed evaluation of the services will not be provided until later this year.

The skin conditions trial was the third phase and was due to wrap up at the end of February 2025.

A spokesman for NSW Health told Dermatology Republic that the six-month extension to 31 August was “due to lower than anticipated consumer uptake”.

So far, the spokesman said, the trial had involved more than 1700 consultations across 480 pharmacies.

“Extending the trial for an additional six months will allow for more data to be collected to inform a thorough evaluation of the dermatology component,” they said.

NSW Health did not disclose whether there was a specific minimum number of consultations that it was aiming for.

But unlike in other states and territories, the NSW Health pharmacist prescribing trial is being run as an official clinical trial, meaning it is registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry.

The upshot is that the ANZCTR portal publishes various endpoints for registered trials; unfortunately, at time of writing the clinical trials site was closed following a cybersecurity incident.

An archived version of the webpage from August 2024, however, was available on the Internet Archive.

According to that page, the trial endpoint was either six months or when 22,857 patients had presented for a consultation.

Given that the UTI trial only involved 18,000 patients over 12 months, it seems likely that this represents a maximum number of patients rather than a minimum; otherwise, pharmacies have just five months and 24 days to complete another 21,157 skin-related consultations.