If you bought paracetamol at the supermarket this week you may have noticed a slight change at the checkout. Packets now have fewer tablets inside and while you can buy more at pharmacies, they also have new restrictions. Health groups and experts are confident the changes will see less people particularly children experiencing an overdose.
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00:00So there's two main changes that the TGA has introduced, as you mentioned.
00:06So the first is that packs sold in supermarkets and places other than pharmacies will reduce
00:11from a maximum of 20 tablets to 16 tablets per pack.
00:16And the second change is in states, all states other than Queensland and Western Australia,
00:21you will see that packs larger than 50 tablets will move from being in front of the pharmacy
00:27counter to being sold behind the counter, and you will need to ask your pharmacist
00:32to request that medication.
00:35In Queensland and Western Australia, any packs smaller than 16 tablets will be moved behind
00:40the pharmacist counter, so in those states people will need to be asking their pharmacist
00:47in order to access any pack sizes with 16 tablets or more.
00:51These changes have come across as we were seeing an increase in the number of poisonings
00:57with paracetamol, so on average we're seeing about 225 people hospitalised with liver injury
01:05each year from paracetamol, as well as about 50 people who are dying from paracetamol overdose.
01:13And over the last few years we have also seen an increase in the number of poisonings, particularly
01:19among young people, so the TGA put out an expert review to really evaluate some of the
01:26trends and the evidence around what interventions might be best to really reduce some of these
01:32harms.
01:33Most manufacturers have already been in the process of reducing pack sizes, so you will
01:38likely have already seen over the last few months that the pack size of paracetamol has
01:44reduced, and you would have already seen over the weekend, I walked into a pharmacy
01:49myself over the weekend, and you can see that the displays of paracetamol, which were previously
01:54at the front counter, have now been moved behind the counter.
01:58These changes really bring Australia in line with some of the other countries, so in countries
02:04such as Denmark and Ireland and the United Kingdom, they've actually introduced smaller
02:10pack sizes a number of years ago and really evaluated the impact of reducing pack sizes,
02:17so after the introduction of these new pack sizes, these countries did observe reductions
02:23in the number of harms.