The Australian Medical Association (AMA) has supported the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency’s (Ahpra’s) recently updated guidelines for medical cannabis prescribing.
Given the increasing numbers of Australian using medical cannabis and an increase observed in poor prescribing practices, Ahpra and the National Boards last week released updated guidance to help practitioners meet their obligations. This follows the AMA calling on health ministers to address the issue, in part by providing adequate resources to Ahpra and the National Boards.
“The rise of the telehealth phenomenon has led to certain models that bypass traditional regulatory frameworks, posing risks to individual patients and the health system more broadly,” said AMA President Dr Danielle McMullen. “These direct-to-consumer, single-issue telehealth models lack clear referral pathways or a feedback loop to GPs and other referrers.”
But Carmen Lim from the National Centre for Youth Substance Use Research at the University of Queensland says Ahpra’s latest action won’t curb unsafe prescribing and has offered suggestions as to what would help here.
The AMA is also calling for stricter enforcement to stop medicinal cannabis companies from exploiting special access schemes and avoiding listing products on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG). The ARTG lists all therapeutic goods that are legally allowed to be supplied in or exported from Australia; including medicines, medical devices, and other therapeutic products.
But products that aren’t can still be accessed via the Special Access Scheme (SAS) and Authorised Prescriber Scheme (APS) pathways. The majority of medicinal cannabis medicines accessed in Australia are unapproved and have not been evaluated by the TGA for safety, quality and efficacy.
As at May this year, there were more than 113,000 applications under the SAS-B pathway for 2025, compared to nearly 178,000 for the entire year of 2024.In 2019, three years after medical cannabis was legalised in Australia, there were just 57,000 applications for the full year.
Back in May this year, the AMA lodge a submission with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) supporting a crackdown on exploitation of the scheme and issues relating to the ARTG.
“To ensure the SAS is not used as a loophole to avoid registering on the ARTG, the TGA should consider reforms that would limit the quantity of products accessed through a SAS before it has to register on the ARTG or lose access through the SAS or APS,” the Association said.
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