Green Cross Health, owner of the Unichem and Life Pharmacy networks, has written an open letter asking every political party to commit to expanding what pharmacists can treat and to fund it properly. The pitch is framed as health policy. Underneath, it is a market-access fight, and the case for opening that market is strong.
Chief executive Rachael Newfield put it plainly to RNZ: “We have this pharmacy workforce, and these thousand pharmacies around New Zealand that can help, and they’re staffed by people who want to help. So we’re asking to let them help.” She pointed out that pharmacists in comparable countries already co-manage stable hypertension, type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol, and argued change here could happen “very quickly” with more funding. She also took aim at a less glamorous problem: New Zealand pharmacists manually break down bulk Pharmac supplies to match each prescription, while Australia uses original pack dispensing that skips the step entirely.
The bottleneck is the rulebook
The government’s own officials identified this a year ago. A Ministry of Health briefing to Minister Simeon Brown in 2025 found only 99 of more than 4,500 pharmacists held prescribing authority, with none known to be using it in a community pharmacy. The same 2025 briefing noted that more than 1,070 community pharmacies employed 76 percent of the 3,158 practising pharmacists, and named two structural barriers: ownership restrictions that stop pharmacist-prescribers holding pharmacy interests without Medsafe consent, and funding rules limiting which medicines can be supplied.
Read that again. Officials did not say pharmacists lacked competence. They said the settings stopped them using it.
Real money, small steps
The government has moved. In June it added a $6.9 million top-up to the Extended Pharmacy Services fund, originally budgeted at $5 million, lifted pharmacy service and immunisation fees by 3.16 percent and redirected $19.2 million a year into core pharmacy payments. Brown called pharmacies the health system’s “front door”.
From 1 October, funded direct supply extends to children’s mild dermatitis, bacterial and fungal skin infections, oral and vaginal thrush and selected oral contraceptives. Useful, but this is a list of minor ailments, not a rethink of who does primary care.
Who the closed door protects
ACT has gone much further. Its Pharmacy First policy would add sore throats, tonsillitis, gout, styes, period pain and STI self-testing, let pharmacists order blood tests, scrap the five-pharmacy ownership cap and remove proximity rules that block new pharmacies opening near existing ones. David Seymour’s line lands: “Pharmacists have the capacity, the need, and the proximity. All that’s missing is permission.” He also cited a government regulatory impact statement admitting the ownership cap is “not being meaningfully followed” anyway.
A cap nobody enforces and proximity rules that shield incumbents from competition are not patient safety measures. They are entry barriers. And every condition a pharmacist cannot treat is a consult that stays with a GP practice, whether or not the patient can get an appointment this week.
Green Cross Health is hardly a neutral party. Its annual result for the year to March 2026 shows 170 Care and Advice Health Hubs able to assess and supply 20 medications, from UTI antibiotics to shingles vaccines, explicitly “positioned to deliver” the government’s expanded services. Script volumes sat flat at 38 million items on a same-store basis. Dispensing is not a growth business; clinical services are. The company has built the capacity before the permission arrived. That is a commercial bet, but self-interest does not make the argument wrong. It is how private capital gets deployed into public problems.
Scope without time is a paper reform
The catch is workload. A peer-reviewed study published in 2024 found that by 2022, 63 percent of pharmacists said they were too busy dispensing to offer more clinical services, up from 46 percent in 2018. That data is dated, and automation has improved since, but the lesson stands. Adding scope to a workforce buried in counting and pouring adds responsibility, not access.
That is why Newfield’s original pack dispensing point may matter more than any headline list of conditions. Free up pharmacist hours and the scope expansion has somewhere to land. Expand scope alone and pharmacy owners face more liability without the staff time to monetise it.
What happens next
The open letter is designed to force positions before the election. ACT has staked out deregulation; the government has offered incremental funding. Expect GP representatives to argue for caution, and expect that argument to be partly about clinical boundaries and partly about revenue.
For business, the test is simple. A country short of doctors cannot afford to leave a thousand staffed, accessible clinics running at a fraction of their capability. The parties that pair wider scope with dispensing reform and freer pharmacy entry will be offering a genuine productivity gain. The rest are offering another list of rashes.
Sources
- RNZ: Health company calls for rule change to let pharmacists treat common conditions (2026-10-08)
- Ministry of Health: Briefing decision, current settings and opportunities for pharmacists (2025-08-12)
- RNZ: Government announces more funding for pharmacies to prescribe common treatments (2026-06-18)
- Pharmac: Decision to extend Pharmacy Services (EPS) (2026-09-23)
- RNZ: ACT wants to expand pharmacists’ power and make it easier to open new pharmacies (2026-08-06)
- Green Cross Health: Annual Result for the Year ended 31 March 2026 (2026-03-31)
- BMC Health Services Research: Changes in provision of extended community pharmacy services in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2018 to 2022 (2024-12-18)
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