Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee, , 58:02 to 1:03:47
Overview of the $700 million Women's Health Package, including new PBS listings for contraceptives and menopause treatments, and pelvic pain clinics.
Topics: Health, Government spending
Speakers: Dr Liz Develin, Ellie Whiteaker, Senator Malcolm Roberts, Unknown Speaker
Excellent. Thank you very much, Senator Antic. It's been just uh on a year, I think, since the government announced its landmark women's health package. Could you talk us through the key elements of that package? I think it's about almost 800 million dollars of investment. Is that right?
That's correct, Senator. It was clo around 703 93 million dollars worth of investment in women's health. It had several components. Uh the first and most significant was a range of new pharmaceuticals being added to the pharmaceutical benefits scheme. They included new contraceptives that had been a long time since we'd had new oral contraceptives pills added to the pharmaceutical benefits scheme. There was also hormonal treatments for uh menopause, perimenopause. So a significant investment in pharmaceuticals. Uh the the women's health package also significantly invested in perimenopause and menopause. The components of that included the nationwide campaign, which some of us are still enjoying seeing the advertisements for, which has really sparked a conversation in Australia and made conversations about perimenopause and menopause part of normal conversation between uh the community, which is excellent to see. Uh that also included updating clinical guidelines. We have also expanded um access to uh long acting and reversible contraceptives. That included both changes to MBS items. To incentivize the bulk billing of the insertion and removal of those. We have established centres of excellence for uh long acting and reversible contraceptives, because Australia has relatively low rates of those use of types of contraceptives, and we wanted to encourage those in Australia. So we have established centres of excellence around Australia. There's also been significant investments in endometriositics and pelvic pain clinics across Australia. They're some of the most significant pieces of the package.
Thank you. I have a few questions on a couple of those that you've mentioned. So you talked about the cheaper medicines. So adding new contraception, menopause, hormone therapy, and endometriosis medicines to the PBS. I think to your point, I think it's been my entire lifetime that we haven't added new contraceptives to the PBS, so that's a really significant change. How many women have had access to cheaper scripts for those kinds of medicines since the introduction of the package?
Thank you, Senator. I I will um our colleagues may not be here from the PBS, but I'm happy to do my very best with the data that I have in front of me. Um in terms of the menopausal hormone therapies, the benefit amount has been over 120 million dollars to the Australian community. For the contraceptives, it's 61 million dollars worth of benefits, and for the endometriosis medication, it's 12.8 million dollars worth of benefits. In terms of the numbers of prescriptions, uh for the contraceptives, it is 1.39 million uh prescriptions. And for the endometriosis, 0.07 million. In terms of the patients, the endometriosis medication has been over 11,000 women benefiting from that. And for the contraceptives, over 500,000 women have benefited.
Wow. That's huge savings for women. So thank you for sharing that. Um you mentioned the long acting uh contraceptives. Um I understand that there's a training program to skill up health practitioners in the use of these uh these types of contraceptives. Do you have numbers on how many health care practitioners have uh have accessed that training?
Uh I I will have to take that on notice. I'll be able to get it for you in the next few moments, I think.
Thank you. That would be excellent. Um and you mentioned the menopause campaign. I've certainly heard lots of women talking about it when I've been uh out and about. Uh and we've certainly um I think it's been really heartening to see it becoming more of a public uh conversation. Uh do you have any insights into how many women across the country have been reached with that campaign?
Uh again, I will try and find the numbers for you. But I do uh the website hits have been phenomenal. I have a figure somewhere in my head of you know over 500,000 unique uses, but I will get that checked.
Yeah, great.
Uh the campaign, one of the most significant components of it was establishing an expert advisory group with people from the women's health sector and particularly community members lived experience, which I think really enabled the government to design a campaign that has been able to hit the mark. Uh it it was historically sometimes a bit of a taboo topic for the community, so I think we've managed to hit that mark.
Thank you. Uh I will share the call, but if you could if you do get the responses to some of those questions, um please do come back to us. Senator Roberts, I'll pass the call to you.
Thank you, Chair.