National mandatory medicines record pledge

Mr Butler said the reforms aim to support prescribers and pharmacists with accurate and up-to-date medicines information on their patients. 

“These reforms are the first step toward delivering a National Medicines Record for all Australians, ensuring that patients and their care teams can have accurate and up-to-date medicine information,” he said. 

“Ensuring this information is accessible to a patient’s usual GP and other healthcare providers will support safer clinical decision-making, reduce the risk of medicine-related harm, and strengthen trust across the healthcare system.” 

Currently, healthcare providers can access prescription history and medications through My Health Record, but patients can hide or remove specific documents or opt out of the program entirely. 

Privacy concerns 

A lengthy consultation period will be held ahead of the rollout, with the aim of striking the delicate balance between patient safety and privacy. 

“Ultimately this is all about patient consent and we want obviously patients consenting to their information being recorded on the record and then the record being available to health professionals that they allow to access the record,” Mr Butler said. 

“We’re confident that will work in the vast, vast majority of cases. But we've got to make sure that technology is available, first to the patient, but also to the medical professional.” 

Consultation is underway to enable this and to include medicines information from all online prescribers by default, with the first phase of that work to be completed by December 2026. 

The 1800Medicare App, where patients can currently access their prescription history through My Health Record, will also be enhanced. 

Doctors are so-far positive. Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president, Michael Wright, says the reform is “a really sensible move”. 

“If people are seeing multiple providers, there’s a risk that information either isn’t shared or gets lost, and we can see tragic circumstances happen,” Dr Wright told ABC News. 

He said many GP practices had software that automatically uploaded electronic scripts, but some online providers were not following the same procedure. 

Erin Collins’ story 

Erin Collins was taking medicine for mental-health issues and began “doctor shopping”, managing to convince several telehealth providers that she needed large quantities of her medication. 

Those doctors were unaware of the complexities of Erin’s condition, or the fact that she had been in hospital several times to be treated for misuse of her medicine. 

Nor did they know that her regular medical team had arranged for her to pick up a controlled dose of medication from her local pharmacy each day. 

The telehealth doctors were not checking or updating Erin’s My Health Record. 

"Her hospital team was putting warning messages in My Health Record in the hope that the telehealth services and local pharmacies would be able to see those records and stop dispensing … [but] they weren't being seen,” Erin’s mother, Alison, told ABC News. 

After Erin died from an overdose, Alison has turned her loss into a rallying cry for action, campaigning for a national alert system so health professionals can detect potential medication abuse. 

Mr Butler was impressed by Alison’s advocacy, vowing to introduce sweeping changes. 

“I was really impacted by Alison’s story and her willingness really to channel what is extraordinary grief into advocacy for a system that’s better for people into the future,” he said. 

Related reading: Mark Butler, ABC, The Conversation,RACGP