Your doctor says that your medicine needs an authority prescription. What do they mean?

Authority prescriptions are used for selected Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) medicines that are intended only for people with specific health conditions. They may also be used when people need more medicine than normal.

Authority prescriptions enable you to obtain such medicines for the cost of a standard PBS prescription ($5 for concession card holders and up to $31.30 for other people). However, you must meet certain eligibility requirements, and your doctor must write the prescription on a special PBS-RPBS authority prescription form.

Once your doctor has given you an authority prescription, you can give the form to the pharmacist as you would any other prescription.

To obtain an authority prescription, you must meet
certain requirements.

Authority only medicines

An example of an authority prescription medicine is alendronate 70 mg (eg Fosamax Once Weekly and Alendro Once Weekly), which is used for the fragile bone condition osteoporosis. To be eligible for an authority prescription of alendronate, you must meet one of the two following conditions

• have osteoporosis and have had a broken bone caused by minimal trauma
• be aged 70 years and over and have very low bone mineral density.

Larger quantities or more repeats

You may also be eligible for an authority prescription if you need a higher dose of a medicine than a normal PBS prescription allows, or if you need more repeats than a normal PBS prescription allows.

For example, if you're taking double the normal dose of a medicine, your doctor may be able to obtain permission to prescribe that dose for you on an authority prescription. This will mean that you can buy twice the amount normally allowed on a prescription for the cost of a normal prescription.

Approval

All authority prescriptions require approval from the government. In some cases, the doctor simply has to enter a special code on an authority prescription form to indicate that you meet the eligibility requirements for the medicine. In other cases, they must obtain approval over the telephone. In almost all cases, this approval is immediate.

If you don't meet the authority prescription eligibility requirements for a medicine, your doctor can only prescribe the medicine for you on a private prescription. This means that you will pay the full price for the medicine, which is usually much more than the standard PBS price.

For more information, talk to your pharmacist or doctor.