As one of the least densely populated countries in the world, Australia presents unique challenges in distributing PBS medicines to people living in rural and remote communities spread across its vast landscape.
This is particularly relevant in Western Australia, our largest state, which spans 2.65 million square kilometres—about a third of the country’s total area—yet is home to only 11 percent of the population.
Every day NPSA’s CSO wholesalers receive medicine orders from rural and remote pharmacies that service these widely scattered areas. By overcoming the challenges posed by distance, CSO wholesalers play a crucial role in managing medicine distribution, ensuring that patients in WA have equal access to, and timely and reliable delivery of, the medicines they need.
For example, the journey of a PBS medicine from Perth to a patient in the township of Kununurra on the edge of the Kimberley covers a distance of some 3,000 km (roughly equivalent to driving from Paris to Moscow) Rather than transporting this high care medicine on a 33-hour drive by road, it is picked and safely packed from a distribution centre in Perth, sent on a flight north where it is transferred to a purpose-built van whose driver takes it on its final journey, arriving in the pharmacy dispensary within 24 hours.*
If the treatment is a specialty cold chain product, such as some of the cutting-edge PBS treatments for cancer or diabetes, it will be packed into a temperature-controlled esky, ensuring it remains stable at the required temperature of 2-8 degrees for more than 30 hours. This provides contingency, safeguarding in the event that the supply journey becomes unexpectedly disrupted and delayed.
Servicing the health needs of West Australians also includes meeting the needs of people living in remote indigenous communities, on outback stations and in mining towns. For communities closer to Perth, the medicines travel by road but even then, it’s a long journey; five hours south to Albany, six hours east to Kalgoorlie. And these journeys happen from our distribution centres in Perth every day that a pharmacy is open servicing their community.
With over 100 years of network knowledge and experience in healthcare logistics, NPSA members and their specialised teams in WA are always ready to “going the extra mile” to service community pharmacy and patients.
*“There are some postcodes in WA where we may take longer to supply given the extreme distance
