A recent clampdown from Queensland’s health department has left hundreds of cosmetic injectable clinics across the state scrambling and facing the threat of closure. It's prompted nurses to rally in Queensland against what they're calling a vanity tax.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00I guess to understand this story I'll provide a bit of a snapshot of how the injectable industry
00:07here in Queensland operates. So regularly a client would go to an injectable cosmetic clinic,
00:13they would have a consultation with a registered nurse and then would have a telehealth consultation
00:17with a nurse practitioner or a doctor before the registered nurse then goes to the cupboard,
00:23gets the medications, the prescription medications and abuses them right then and there. But what's
00:28happened in this case is in December last year Queensland Health issued a fact sheet, it's very
00:34routine and in this case that fact sheet stated that registered nurses could not store these S4
00:40medicines like filler and Botox without a nurse practitioner or a doctor on site and those
00:46doctors and nurse practitioners had sole responsibility over these S4 medicines and
00:51registered nurses say they were offered two pathways to essentially deal with this. The first
00:58being that their clients could go and get these scripts from a doctor, go to the chemist, have
01:03them dispense themselves and then take them to a clinic. But registered nurses say this opens obvious
01:08pathways for misuse saying that clients could choose to try and inject them at home, they could try and
01:14sell them on or they could turn to the black market as well. The second option that registered nurses
01:19were given was that they could employ a nurse practitioner or a doctor at their clinic to organise
01:25and I guess to operate these storage cupboards with these medicines. But the nurses that we spoke to today
01:32say that this will drive up their prices even if they could find a doctor to employ in this doctor shortage, it would cost
01:38them too much money and it's already forced the closure of more than a dozen clinics across here in Queensland.
01:44We spoke with one nurse today who said that her insurance agency would not insure her anymore because
01:51she was technically operating outside the constraints of the law and this is what she had to say.
01:56For a small business it's hard because it's driving our prices up which means we're going to have to put our prices up for our patients.
02:03You know it's hard sitting at home sort of waiting for our scripting companies to get the back end of things sorted so we can work
02:10again and you know all of us want to do the right thing. We're okay with rules and regulation but it needs to work for our small businesses as well.
02:18And that leads us today to the rally here just outside Parliament House. We spoke with several registered nurses who are calling for a seat at the table. They're calling the consultation with policy makers as well. They say that they're not against regulation, they're not against laws but it needs to be done in a way that's economically viable.
02:38What does Queensland Health say?
02:43Well Gemma, Queensland Health says that there's been no change of law, there's been no change of the regulation but the clarification at least came a shock to the dozens of registered nurses that I spoke to here today.
02:55Queensland Health says that safety is the utmost priority, that they are working with the industry to ensure compliance.