Christine Jenkins

So we need to go to the regulators as well and say, we want anti-inflammatory reliever to be available at an equal price to patients so that patients aren't bearing the cost of having poorly controlled asthma and then ending up

losing time from school and work and all the things that happen when an asthma attack occurs, which is an eminently preventable event.

There are many barriers, Priya, and they're all, you know, they're not insurmountable, but they require coordination of regulation, education, awareness.

And so what we would say about

The blue puffer is that we now have an alternative.

We want to argue the case with government and we intend to do that as a group.

And I think the asthma organisations more broadly want to do that, to say that the anti-inflammatory reliever is really crucial for patient care

and that it should be an equal cost.

It shouldn't be a disadvantage to patients to opt for the best quality care instead of something that we now know is really outmoded and belongs back in the 20th century.

It's absolutely not part of modern asthma care.

Our national guidelines are adequate, Norman, but to go to that point, we don't have national standards for asthma care.

We have national standards for many other aspects of care through the Australian Commission for Quality and Safety in Healthcare, but we don't have national standards for asthma care.

Yes, we do have the Australian Asthma Handbook, and that advocates no more Ventolin alone for asthma.

anti-inflammatory relievers, stepping up to maintenance and reliever therapy with anti-inflammatory medication.

And crucially, the handbook, I guess, isn't fairly new in these changes.

And so we need to be educating health practitioners about it and patients about it.

So that is our role as health practitioners.

But into the bargain, I think we also need government to help us.

We've suggested, for instance, a label, a warning label,

on the blue puffer, something that says, Ventolin alone is no longer recommended for your asthma management, or this medication in excess causes harm for your asthma.