Through natural disasters and local emergency situations, Australia’s CSO wholesalers are flexible and resilient, safeguarding reliable and timely delivery of medicines to patients nationwide.
As the impact of climate change worsens, our emergency readiness plans are being more frequently deployed for events such as bushfires and floods. In 2024, Australia saw devastation caused by cyclones Jasper and Kirrily in Queensland, along with record heatwave conditions, particularly in Western Australia and periods of extended power outages.
During these emergencies NPSA members were uniquely positioned to work as part of relief efforts by triaging and distributing vital medicines into affected communities, and providing critical advice and updates to Government, regulators such as the TGA and healthcare professionals.
Bushfires 2019 – 2020
Our distribution networks across the country have been built up over 100 years and are supported and serviced by locals. This grassroots knowledge meant that during the bushfires in 2019-20 our specialist teams were able, under pressure, to design workarounds to get medicines and health related products through to those communities in need.
In supporting this at our head offices, we established emergency rooms informed by real-time data to divert and redeploy supplies of medicines where they were needed. Our members chartered planes and helicopters, arranged special freight deliveries by barge and continued to work with local residents to establish access routes for medicine deliveries.
We met the increased risk of acute respiratory and cardiovascular health effects caused by smoke haze with the delivery of essential in-demand medications.
“We get paid for lifting and shifting, but that’s only a part of what we do, it’s solving everyday problems. If you think about what happened with the bushfires, the fire ravaged areas that we needed to get into, every day the wholesalers were meeting and working out how they could work with the Country Fire Service, the Army, the Navy, the Police, local pharmacies to get products to patients – and we were able to do it.”
Richard Vincent, NPSA Chair
The COVID-19 Pandemic
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, NPSA worked together with federal and state governments to ensure continuity of medicines supply nationwide, despite lockdowns, border closures and other restrictions.
NPSA members stepped into an industry leadership position, overseeing the supply chain to actively manage the impact of global medicine shortages, ensuring equitable distribution, even to the remotest of communities. Our members also managed unprecedented surges in demand, recording historic milestones in healthcare logistics. The NPSA medicine distribution network distributed more than 70 million PBS medicines between March and early April 2020, representing an 80% uplift in normal PBS volume.
At very short notice, we managed supply issues and the complex and highly pressurised distribution of Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) as well as the newly approved COVID anti-viral medicines and PPE into hospitals.
The COVID pandemic highlighted the essential need to ensure a reliable and sustainable medicines supply chain. Strong links save lives – not just during times of calm, but also in times of crisis.
“During the COVID-19 pandemic… in just over four weeks, we supplied 70 million medicines to community pharmacies, when there’s normally around 300 million scripts delivered per annum. That is almost 20% of the annual volume in one month. Within 24 hours, our real time data was telling us that we were going to have some surges and shortages in stock and obviously we started working with the manufacturers, we started working with the pharmacists to work through how we would manage that. We showed the supply chain is resilient, it’s robust, it’s adaptable, it’s agile”.
Richard Vincent, NPSA Chair
