A Canberra mother who lost her son to mental health and prescription drugs has questioned delays to real-time prescription monitoring in the ACT, and called for it to be mandatory for all doctors.
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Ann Finlay lost her son, Paul Fennessy, in January 2010 to a prescription drug overdose, leading to a seven-year battle for an coronial inquest into his death, which was completed in August last year.
In the three years before his death, Mr Fennessy accessed 150 prescriptions from 18 different Canberra doctors, a period chronicled in The Canberra Times' investigative podcast Losing Paul.
The Coroner, Margaret Hunter, recommended the territory government implement a real-time prescription monitoring system urgently so both doctors and chemists could see red flags if a patient was accessing too many medications.
This week, Health Minister Meeghan Fitzharris announced she would introduce the legislation to fully implement the $729,000 system by March next year, nine years after Mr Fennessy died.
Ms Fitzharris has previously said the ACT was more advanced than other jurisdictions, except Tasmania where it already operates, and that given those advances, and the smaller population, it should be quicker and easier to set up.
She also said, in announcing plans to introduce the bill earlier this week, that it would be an opt-in arrangement for doctors, but reporting would remain mandatory for chemists.
Such a scheme design raises the prospect that chemists, and the health directorate, would know about a patient's potential misuse, but not the prescribing doctor, unless they opted in to the scheme.
But on Monday the government pulled the legislation from the Assembly's schedule, ahead of a COAG health ministers' meeting on Friday expected to discuss the long-awaited national scheme.
Ms Finlay is pushing for the system to be implemented and this week questioned the continued delays to the implementation, scheduled to be finished nine years after her son died.
While Ms Finlay has previously written that a real-time monitoring system was not the only solution - more drug and alcohol and mental health services were needed in Canberra, but it would play a key role.
She said while she welcomed the government's plan to introduce the improved system, she was surprised by what was another "incredibly frustrating delay", as her understanding was the bill was to be introduced this week.
"I and others remain concerned about the delay in the system's implementation and believe it should be mandatory to target and support those most at risk of harm from poly-pharmaceutical misuse," she said.
"Any delays in implementation of the scheme will result in more deaths from prescription drug overdose.
"Why are there so many complexities in implementing it in the ACT, when it is already up and running in other jurisdictions and proven to save lives?"
Mz Fitzharris told 2CC Radio on Thursday she would be seeking to get a national agreement on a "compatible" system this Friday, so that even if each jurisdiction was slightly different, each state or territory "can effectively plug in".
She said she now expected to introduce legislation to implement the ACT's system in May this year.
