Credit: FreePik

In a bid to strengthen the pharmacy workforce and remove “unnecessary” regulation, parliament has passed a bill that will scrap one of three pharmacy ownership rules, allowing prescribers to become pharmacy owners.

The repeal of section 42C of the Medicines Act 1981, prohibiting authorised prescribers and delegated prescribers from holding an interest in a pharmacy without a Medsafe-license, was a late addition to associate health minister David Seymour’s Medicines Amendment Bill and was supported by all parties except for the two newly independent MPs, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi and Tākuta Ferris.

However, the act still requires pharmacies and their ownership companies to be majority owned by pharmacists, so while the bill will permit full pharmacist-prescriber ownership of pharmacies, for now non-pharmacist prescribers will be limited to minority ownership.

Other key aspects of the Medicines Amendment Act 2025 are the "Rule of Two" verification pathway where the act introduces a process for approving new medicines in New Zealand, allowing approval within 30 days if the product has already been approved by two recognised international regulatory authorities. The initial recognised jurisdictions are Australia, the US, Canada, the UK, the European Union, Singapore and Switzerland. 

It also brings expanded prescribing rights where nurse practitioners and pharmacist prescribers can prescribe unapproved medicines (under section 29), a right previously restricted to doctors.  

Moreover, to mitigate supply shortages, all authorised prescribers can within their scope of practice now prescribe Pharmac-funded unapproved medicines where there is a shortage of approved medicines. For more, see the Ministry of Health’s website.