Speaking during Advanced Pharmacy Australia’s Medicines Management 2025 conference in Melbourne, the three spoke about how residencies can help pharmacists keep getting feedback through their early careers, medicines reconciliation and points of transition, as well as the greater role pharmacists and pharmacy technicians can play in the healthcare system.

Simpson explained that “transitions of care is not a problem we have solved in Australia by any measure”.

“We did some great work obviously this year partnering with the condition on the practise standards around transitions of care, but we’re also looking at how we expand those collaborative prescribing models at the point of discharge,” he said.

“We know discharge summaries and discharge medication lists have a high rate of inaccuracy and there’s hospitals that are already implementing collaborative prescribing models at that point and seeing dramatic reductions, so patients out the door hours quicker with the right medicines.

“Our challenge there is that until we have PBS prescribing rights for pharmacists, all the pharmacists can do is write a prescription and ask the doctor to sign it, and that means that you’re still effectively wasting a lot of time because it’s not a value add activity at that step.

“If they’ve already agreed the treatment plan, then adding a signature to a page doesn’t add value, but it just takes time.”

O’Hara, who has been closely involved in the collaborative prescribing trial in NSW, said that it had been “really exciting this year to see advocacy really pay off”.

NSW and WA “are getting collaborative prescribing over the line” in terms of legislation change, she said.

“So getting that, working with all of the states to get that through has been a really massive achievement. And in New South Wales, those legislation changes are now fixed in the legislation and they’ve acknowledged that partnered pharmacists prescribing or charting is really key to getting people through the emergency rooms faster and getting those medicines right quicker.

“So that’s been a really significant piece of advocacy work that has really paid off for both the profession and for our patients in that space.

“So we continue to really advocate for and encourage for pharmacists prescribing to be done in that collaborative way as part of getting pharmacists embedded in multidisciplinary teams to focus on the medicines and give everybody else the time to do what they do best.”

01:20 – How have the new practise recognition pathways evolved through 2025?

04:20 – The value of the independent pathway

05:38 – Advancements in empowering pharmacy technicians and assistants

08:09 – The launch of AdPha’s clinical standards

09:33 – How can these changes be scaled nationally to free up pharmacists for higher level clinical duties?

11:42 – The difference between a residency and an internship

16:50 – “Our transitions of care are some of the highest risk points in any patient’s journey.”

20:46 – The NSW collaborative prescribing trial

21:52 – “1.3 billion of wasted expenditure in hospitals”

22:58 – Gaps and loopholes in transitions of care

25:09 – The impact of MedsAware Deprescribing Week

27:23 – How is the integration of electronic prescribing and electronic medical records fundamentally changing the clinical workflow of hospital pharmacists and what digital competencies are now essential for new graduates?

28:38 – “I expect to see digital competencies start to be built into our university degrees.”

32:00 – How is AdPha working with regulatory bodies and health services formally recognised the credential specialist, clinical pharmacists, and to ensure the remuneration and role expansion?

35:05 – “We’ve seen employers as well now asking for ANZCAP recognition as part of applications for jobs.”

36:24 – The gap in seven-day clinical pharmacy services

39:25 – Recruitment, retention and burnout

43:25 – Why are there more vacancies?

44:25 – “One nice trend I’m seeing these days is that there is much more of a portability in the profession.”

46:33 – Hopes and goals for 2026

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Among the topics covered in this podcast are:

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Susan Nguyen, a Sydney pharmacy co-owner and founder of ADHD Support Pharmacist, has told AJP Podcast host Carlene McMaugh that she hopes pharmacists will try to gain a better understanding of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and consider how it affects patients’ lives in multiple ways – including its comorbidities, and what pharmacists can do to help.

She likens it to diabetes in the way that people make negative judgements about a patient’s behaviour – but also contrasts it with regard to the lack of a holistic approach.

“When you look at someone who has diabetes, they experience the judgement, ‘oh, they’ve got diabetes. Oh, they must have been having too much sugar or too many soft drinks. Or their parents probably gave them lollies every day’,” she says.

But even with this wider social stigma, pharmacists do not generally hold negative opinions about people with diabetes, she says, and do consider the wider picture.

“You’re thinking of foot care, wound care, vaccinations, diabetes med checks… diabetes has a lot of, I guess, comorbidities and other conditions and lifestyle factors played as well.

“When you look at ADHD, it’s a lot, just much the same. You’re looking at a lot of comorbidities, you’re looking at lifestyle, you’re looking at complications, you’re looking at as well, the stigma…

“When you care for someone with ADHD and you delve into it more, you start to see there’s anxiety, there’s depression, there’s also [that] unmanaged ADHD means they may be eating, there could be obesity there, drug use work, relationship problems, a whole gamut.

“So it’s where pharmacists need to be.”

Nguyen also looks into misconceptions such as overdiagnosis, that ADHD is a condition mainly affecting boys, and that ADHD medicines may impact quality of life.

And significantly, she speaks about how people with ADHD are judged negatively for their own symptoms.

“The lack of concentration, the disorganisation, the time blindness, not being able to manage your scripts, not getting your scripts.

“It goes out of date, you freak out, the patient rings up and they say, ‘look, I haven’t got any of my medications left’.

“When we hear that it could be easily seen as they’re being lazy, they’ve been so they’ve let themselves down to let us down.

“It’s such a hassle. It’s inconvenient, but it’s the presenting symptom, and they’re stigmatised for their presenting symptoms.

“We’re actually, as healthcare professionals, as pharmacists, as even as society, we’re almost punishing people with ADHD for what they have, whereas someone with diabetes, they might have more UTIs, they might have infections that just don’t heal, that sort of stuff.

“But there’s a lot of support. And that’s because we look at the symptoms, we understand the pathophysiological side, but because of that lack of, I guess, understanding of ADHD, it’s become more of about a character flaw or character trait.

“And so that really makes it hard for, I guess, healthcare professionals to show that care and support.

“And I feel that this is where we need to really, as pharmacists making that stance on that and then supporting our patients in a much better way.”

01:21 – Why does ADHD need more attention in pharmacy?

04:18 – The comparison with diabetes

07:14 – ADHD in women and inattentive symptoms

08:11 – The role of social media

12:26 – Will medication “fix it up”?

14:04 – How can we widen our views?

16:32 – “With stimulant prescribing, it is hard.”

18:10 – The consequences of unmanaged ADHD

20:44 – How do we share information?

21:49 – “Pharmacists may think, oh, they’re going to get tolerant when they take  Ritalin for so long.”

23:10 – “If you’ve seen a patient who comes in with their prescription for Vyvanse, we can’t assume that, hey, everything’s under control.”

26:27 – The carer’s perspective

28:37 – Pharmacists with ADHD

32:39 – “We need more pharmacists to really be in that space to advocate for patients.”

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National Australian Pharmacist Students Association national president Sebastian Harper has opened up to AJP Podcast host Carlene McMaugh about the financial pressures on pharmacy students – and how NAPSA aims to take a greater role in advocacy for the profession.

“There really needs to be a revolution in how we approach placements, and this doesn’t just go for pharmacy, but this is, as far as I understand, pretty much all health disciplines,” Harper says.

He highlights the increasing cost of living throughout the 2020s… “which I think everyone, not just in Australia but around the world is very conscious of”.

“But students, young people, but also mature age students, many who might have a mortgage, they might have kids at home that they have to feed. The cost of living crisis is really hitting hard and that’s why we’re trying to, in our capacity as a student organisation, mitigate that as much as possible.”

Students are literally having to decide whether they can afford to buy food or pay rent at their usual home, and actually finish their placements, Harper says.

He also talks about the “hidden costs” of prac placements – from uniforms to transport and hospital parking – as well as offering some advice for preceptors.

But there have been positive developments as well, he says – not only have some disciplines been granted prac payments, there are options such as government housing for students.

“I had a fantastic experience on placement where I was in Mount Isa and I was housed with about six other students from other health disciplines,” he enthuses.

“We had a couple speechies, we had a medicine student, dental student physio, science, so there were a lot of different disciplines there, and it was great to just for our mental wellbeing, but also the idea of us being better interprofessional collaborators in the future that after each shift we got to almost debrief about our days and interesting cases we saw.

“I learned more about what speechies do there purely by just talking to them.”

He also tells McMaugh about the establishment of the Health Students Alliance, a new organisation bringing together just over 40 health student associations across the country.

00:56 – Priorities for NAPSA

02:38 – The cost of living, and lack of prac payments

03:38 – The impact of placement poverty

05:57 – Advocating for a highly feminised workforce

08:00 – Hidden costs

10:47 – “I’ve just anecdotally heard from my members on calls or at events and things like that, but they’re literally going hungry throughout the entire day.”

11:47 – How financial pressures impact health

14:41 – Youth allowance and advocacy

19:40 – Some solutions

23:38 – How can pharmacists support their students?

26:04 – The potential for impact on the future workforce

30:24 – How to find your niche

33:17 – Some of NAPSA’s key initiatives – including splitting the rural and Indigenous chair positions

37:10 – “The future of pharmacy is incredibly exciting.”

39:52 – “The biggest thing that registered pharmacists can do is just enable the excitement of the next generation.”

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Murdock tells the AJP Podcast’s Carlene McMaugh about the many times she has reinvented herself – from arriving in Australia from war-torn Iraq “with nothing, just hope” to the time she walked away from a job that refused to offer her, a single mother, the flexibility she needed to parent her son.

“I think people often think of pharmacists as people that dispense and dispense scripts and check scripts, but once they get to know me, they realise our impact goes far beyond the pharmacy doors,” she says.

“We’re often the first point of contact for someone who’s scared in crisis, overwhelmed or in pain, and we’re quite often educating or triaging. We listen a lot and we are often in people’s lives for a very long time, so we have conversations we support, we offer support, and we build trust and that’s where the real impact happens, not just inside the pharmacy but out in their community every single day.”

For Murdock, this means “hands-on” health delivery in Pascoe Vale, where she works, going to local clubs to do free blood pressure checks, getting involved with Rotary, overhauling her pharmacy to put in consulting rooms and talking at schools and local football cubs.

But it also means really being there when it matters to patients.

“I’ll never forget this lady who came into the pharmacy one late afternoon. I remember it clearly because she wasn’t a regular patient and she looked completely overwhelmed.

“She had a toddler on one hip and a script and her hand and her eyes looked quite puffy that she’d been crying and on paper at the time it looked like just a repeat for an antidepressant that you could have dispensed, but something just didn’t feel right and instead of just processing her prescription, I asked her gently at the time, ‘how are you? Are you okay?’

“And she broke down, she hadn’t slept, she hadn’t eaten properly and she’d just left the home because of an abusive partner.

“And she said to me, I didn’t know where else to go. So I came here and in that moment the pharmacy became more than a pharmacy.

“I brought her into the consult room, gave her space to breathe, linked her to support services, and I contacted her GP to coordinate the next steps.

“But more than that, I made her feel safe, seen, not rushed and not judged. And I remember her saying that I was the very first person who didn’t look away and that interaction has stayed with me forever.

“I believe behind every prescription is someone surviving something and sometimes the difference we make isn’t in the medicine, but in the way we choose to show up.”

01:13 – “Sliding doors” – why Murdock left one pharmacy job, finding her way to one which was “amazing”

02.23 – What people don’t realise about pharmacists

04:03 – “We’ve built a culture I’m very proud of where every voice is heard.”

04:46 – Helping a desperate customer

05:51 – Advice on handling difficult situations

08:07 – “I’ve had to reinvent myself quite a few times and it started early.”

10:54 – What keeps you going?

11.29 – “Balanced? What’s that word?”

12:49 – Transforming health care in Pascoe Vale

15:32 – Beyond the pharmacy walls

16:57 – If you could change one thing in the pharmacy profession, what would it be?

17:38 – Advice for pharmacists starting out

18:49 – “Balance doesn’t mean perfect proportions every single day.”

19:04 – AI and pharmacy

20:29 – How Murdock’s pharmacy evolves to meet the community’s needs

20: 51 – How does the future look?

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“There is still a lot of people who are scared of AI,” says Andrew Bartlett, academic at the University of Sydney’s School of Pharmacy, and PhD candidate.

“Students are afraid to use it. They think they’’re going to get caught cheating.”

But “The way that university, particularly the University of Sydney works now, is that we have assessments to help learning and we have assessments of learning and AI is allowed in those assessments where it’s helping learning.

“I think there’s a misconception [that] whatever you put in is private and I don’t think it is. And so I think there’s some serious concerns that people need to take into consideration about what they put into AI.”

Bartlett has been having his students help him develop AI agents – “it’s a bit of a class project”.

“I have a pharmacy management tutor and we use it in the class, so I’ll give them a topic, say we’re talking about the pharmacy employment landscape in different areas of Australia.

“I might give each little table group a prompt and they put it into the agent and then collectively they’ve got to come up with a three minute presentation that they’ve got to teach back the class.

“So they quite like doing that. It means that there’s almost like an extra one of me accessible when they need it.

“When it comes to exam preparation as well, it’s got all my teaching resources in there, they can ask it questions, I can train it to behave a bit like I would in the way that it asks questions.

“So I’m accessible 24 hours, but I still get to sleep.”

01:12 – Bartlett’s background in pharmacy, and how he became interested in AI

02:18 – “I was seeing them use AI in classrooms and I was seeing that they were using it really badly.”

03:24 – AI misconceptions

04:37 – How students respond to the AI agents

06:48 – AI for patient counselling scenarios

08:50 – The key benefits of simulated patient interactions

09:39 – How to minimise mistakes

11:16 – “AI can be quite good at stepping someone through a reflective process.”

13:02 – Bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world pharmacy skills

14:29 – How could AI change a pharmacist’s day-to-day role?

15:56 – “It’s interesting looking at the biases that come through.”

19:24 – What skills do pharmacists need in an AI-driven future?

21:35 – Getting up to speed

22:36 – The next frontier

25:17 – Embracing AI in business

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“It starts with knowing your values, what you are looking for, that you’re willing to leave the comfort of where you are and start something new,” says Carlene McMaugh. 

In the latest episode of the AJP Podcast, McMaugh details the ways pharmacists can think about their career in 2025. 

There are opportunities to use new technology for searches and to brush up on marketing, she said. 

“You could type in your skills or your experiences and to ChatGPT and ask for suggestions about roles or you can even put your CV in and ask what options there are out there.”

Other highlights include: 

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Carlene McMaugh

The AJP Podcast talks to the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia’s inaugural Aged Care Pharmacist of the Year – Neil Petrie, who has been working primarily in aged care, undertaking medication reviews for the past 25 years.

He has also owned his own community pharmacy in the past and semi-retired into aged care onsite pharmacy under the ACOP program.

With a father and uncle who were pharmacists, he says he remembers being about six or seven years old, “and going to the pharmacy after hours with my dad to make up an APC mixture, if I remember rightly, which was aspirin, phenacetin, and caffeine in it”.

“And I vividly remember my father saying, hold that needle and don’t drop it. And what did I do? I dropped it onto the footpath, didn’t I?

“So pharmacy’s been in my blood for a long time and I did have my own pharmacy for about 13 years, but I realised I wanted to do something a little bit different and when I had my pharmacy, I started servicing some hostels at that point in time and I really enjoyed that work.”

Petrie was one of Australia’s first pharmacists accredited to conduct medication reviews in 1998 – and ever since, his motto has been change.

He says ACOP will only increase in time, and “highlights our impact on direct resident care, medication safety, the quality use of medicines, and really system-wide improvements to medication procedures. So it really showcases us as pharmacists as a valued integral part of the care team.”

This is also highlighted, he says, by the sheer need for pharmacists’ services; discussing the most common medication-related problems in aged care facilities, given the amount of polypharmacy – and more importantly, inappropriate polypharmacy – underway.

01:13 – Neil’s introduction to pharmacy

03:42 – Aged care: a changing environment

05:11 – RMMRs and lack of rural and remote support: a disillusioning moment

06:14 – The responsibility of promoting ACOP

07:39 – Over 30-plus years in the field, what has changed the most?

09:29 – “How one person within the organisation can change an organisation overnight”

10:40 – The most common medication-related problems in ACFs

11:46 – Beginning an antibiotic stewardship program

13:11 – Taking the workload off the nurses

15:09 – “We have to get to a point where society says wherever medication is involved in therapy, there’s a pharmacist involved.”

17:11 – Thoughts on deprescribing

18:36 – The role of interdisciplinary team-based care

20: 54 – “How do you approach educating both residents and their families about their medications?”

22:07 – Practical strategies

23: 58 – “Polypharmacy is challenging.”

25: 06 – Neil’s vision for the future

29:26 – How can technology help?

32:18 – What advice would you give young pharmacists?

42:07 – A passion for antimicrobial use

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Meridian Lawyers’ Chandrika Darroch joins PDL Podcast host, Amy Minion, and pharmacist, Georgina Woods, to discuss how to apologise when incidents occur. 

This episode of the Be Risk Ready PDL Podcast looks at how to apologise for an incident, and what to do and not do.  

The topics covered include: 

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The Capital Chemist Charnwood is in the news again: 11 years after being named Guild Pharmacy of the Year, it has again taken home two of the final awards in the competition, being recognised for excellence in Community Engagement and Excellence in Harm Minimisation at APP25.

Co-owner Samantha Kourtis told AJP Podcast host Carlene McMaugh that government decisions, made without input from pharmacy, were a strong influence on her implementing a fee-for-service model.

“From the early days, I’ve been a huge advocate for charging [for] things,” Kourtis says.

“And 13 years ago I walked into this pharmacy. Everything was free, free blood pressure, free home delivery, free Webster packs, free consult with the baby nurse, free everything.

“And early on I was like, well, this has to stop.”

It simply wasn’t a viable business model, she realised – perhaps counter-intuitive given that Charnwood is one of Canberra’s lowest socioeconomic demographics, but as it turned out, customers are happy to pay what pharmacist expertise is worth.

She pointed out that she bought into the business in March 2010 – and that in October that year, the federal government announced accelerated price disclosure.

“I was in a real position where my business loan could have crashed and burned. The bank could have come in and taken it away because overnight the value of our businesses went down…

“And we’ve seen this happen several times over the last 10 years with what the government’s done.

“So it was my commitment to valuing the work that a registered healthcare professional did and my commitment to stopping the of services in pharmacy and then the financial pressure on me as a brand new young business owner that had to go, okay, well, I don’t want to pay my pharmacist award wage. I want to pay them well, because they do a really great job.

“So if someone wants to sit down with a pharmacist for a blood pressure check, they’ll pay for it. And that has gained momentum from then. And we were charging $15, 13 years ago, for a wound consult fee.”

01:40 – Becoming an award-winning pharmacy through the ups and downs

05:01 – What did winning the awards mean for staff and the community?

06:59 – Talking about harm minimisation in schools

08:07 – What it takes to being an award-winning pharmacy in this space

11:11 – Engaging with the community

13:22 – The viable business model

16:11 – Why $10 for a consult is “such a joke that is so disrespectful to our profession”.

17:01 – “Nobody complains really about the price.”

18:29 – What does being unsurprised in pharmacy mean to you?

21:10 – “I could not believe that the leaders in our country thought that [disparaging pharmacists over 60-day dispensing] was a good idea.”

22: 31 – “Actually, it doesn’t matter what I think. Doesn’t matter how I practise, doesn’t matter how much I care, things are going to happen. And that was quite freeing.”

24:11 – On being part of the scope trials

28:38 – What are the core values of your pharmacy?

31:35 – A challenge for pharmacists: be unsurprised

34:36 – A “vulnerable time” for pharmacy

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