The Australian Department of Health has agreed to extend the arrangements for image-based prescriptions until the end of the year, as a backlash grows in the midst of the COVID-19 crises in NSW, Victoria and the ACT.

The department told Pulse+IT last month that while the subsidy for the SMS costs for GPs issuing electronic prescription tokens would continue until next June, the special arrangements for image-based prescriptions – which allow doctors to email, text or fax a digital image of a paper script to the patient’s pharmacy – were to cease on September 30.