Medicines Access Programs (MAP) Policy
The Medicines Access Programs (MAP) Policy (PDF 397KB) provides the mandatory requirements for the governance of MAP within SA Health.
MAPs provide patients and prescribers with access to medicines that may be unavailable through other usual funding mechanisms such as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). MAPs allow clinicians the opportunity, where clinically appropriate, to use, evaluate, and become familiar with a medicine without putting patients, staff, and SA Health at risk of inappropriate discontinuation of therapy or unanticipated costs at the cessation of a program.
Appropriate governance ensures equity of access and protects patients and providers from medicines access program arrangements that may unduly expose them to physical or financial risk.
Applicability
This policy applies to all employees and contracted staff of SA Health; that is all employees and contracted staff of the Department for Health and Wellbeing, Local Health Networks (LHN) (including state-wide services aligned with those Networks), and SA Ambulance Service.
This policy covers all medicines access arrangements offered by the pharmaceutical industry to facilitate deferred cost, cost-free or subsidised access to medicines for LHN and state-wide service patients before relevant funding arrangements are implemented. These include compassionate use, expanded access, product familiarisation, cost-share and all other similarly named access programs.
Out of Scope
This policy does not apply to:
- Medicines used as part of a registered clinical trial approved by the relevant Human Research Ethics Committee.
- Requirements for access to products covered under relevant SA Health procurement, consumable trials, biomedical engineering and health technology assessment processes and policies, including:
- Approval of products or equipment for routine use (e.g. by the SA Health Biomedical Engineering Service and Procurement Product Standardisation Committee).
- Approval of high risk, high cost health technologies (by the SA Policy Advisory Committee on Technology).