Credit: FreePik

In a bid to strengthen the pharmacy workforce and remove “unnecessary” regulation, parliament has passed a bill that will scrap one of three pharmacy ownership rules, allowing prescribers to become pharmacy owners.

The repeal of section 42C of the Medicines Act 1981, prohibiting authorised prescribers and delegated prescribers from holding an interest in a pharmacy without a Medsafe-license, was a late addition to associate health minister David Seymour’s Medicines Amendment Bill and was supported by all parties except for the two newly independent MPs, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris.

However, the act still requires pharmacies and their ownership companies to be majority owned by pharmacists, so while the bill will permit full pharmacist-prescriber ownership of pharmacies, for now non-pharmacist prescribers will be limited to minority ownership.

The New Zealand Association of Optometrists and Ophthalmology New Zealand had not responded to questions by time of publication.