Ryan Park

We've all got family members who frequently use pharmacists for different reasons.

I know I use the same pharmacist.

They understand my health background, the background of many of my family members who go there.

These are highly trained individuals and this provides them with an opportunity to sit down with a customer, in this case a female, and work through what those issues are, what they're looking at, take them through all the different side effects and things to look at in the same way a GP is.

What we're trying to do here is take a bit of pressure off GPs

In some areas, it's very difficult to get a GP.

It's even more difficult to get a bulk billing GP.

What I'm trying to do is make this type of healthcare more convenient whilst at the same time maintaining really high standards in terms of safety.

Well, I'd say that we are moving in the same way that many other jurisdictions around the world are, in the same as Queensland have moved into providing this through a pharmacy model, but in a really safe and secure way, providing additional training to pharmacists to be able to undertake this.

So this won't just be for any pharmacist.

Pharmacists will have to do another round of training to be able to do this.

That is a massive commitment.

But what we hope to see is that this be spread right across the community and

So women can access, to be blunt, what is a really, really baseline level of healthcare, something that they should have access to really conveniently and effectively for them.

But at a time when we know our GPs are under pressure, we know they're time poor, and we know that bulk billing GPs, there's less and less of them, particularly in certain parts of Sydney and New South Wales, we think this hits the mark.

I think we need to talk more about it.

I'll be brutally honest.

This is an issue that I think parents need to have really forthright conversations with their teenagers and young adults in their family about.

I know that from my friend's perspectives, they're having those sort of conversations.

We all need to have them.