Conference 2025 Speakers

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Keynote speakers

Associate Professor Cobus Gerber

APSA Lecturer

University of South Australia

Cobus Gerber

Cobus is a graduate of the University of Port Elizabeth and obtained his Doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Pretoria in South Africa in 1993. He moved to Australia in 2001 and joined the University of South Australia in 2004. He now leads the Population Health Chemistry group within the Clinical and Health Sciences Unit at UniSA. His research focus is to show the scale of use of substances with abuse potential, including pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs. He has expertise in sample extraction and mass spectrometry-based detection and collaborates internationally in the emerging field of Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE). He has published several scientific papers and reports for government agencies on the application of WBE. He is partner in the collaboration that underpins the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program, the first and most comprehensive of its kind globally. The local South Australian program is now the longest continuous and most comprehensive drug surveillance program globally. More recently, Cobus’ research group has been conducting drug residue analysis in discarded injecting paraphernalia to better understand the risk of emerging drugs being used in Australia.

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Trends in psychoactive substance use in Australia by wastewater analysis and injecting paraphernalia

Wastewater-based epidemiology has become a common approach to demonstrate chemical exposure and infectious disease marker load excreted by a catchment population. Consumption of psychoactive substances is of particular interest due to the abuse potential of many pharmaceutical drugs. Illicit drugs and lifestyle markers such as tobacco and alcohol pose specific risks as well.

This presentation will show the scale of use of various substances from the South Australian drug monitoring program, the longest continuous project of its type globally, as well as the Australian drug monitoring program. Wastewater samples have been collected bimonthly up to a 13-year period. Excreted loads were determined using daily flow rates from wastewater treatment plants covering capital cities and main regional centres of Australia. Using catchment populations and pharmacokinetic data, daily loads of excreted target drug residues were back-calculated and expressed as drug consumption to scale drugs of different potencies.

Most pharmaceutical substances were detected in every sample, except fentanyl (>90%), while heroin was measured less frequently in regional centres compared to the capital cities. More recently, the highly potent nitazenes, a pharmaceutical class of drugs which never made it to market due to their potency and side effects, have been detected in 5% of samples. Findings show how wastewater surveillance provide a suitable measure of the success of various intervention programs to minimise harm.

One limitation of wastewater analysis is that polydrug use cannot be determined. Results from a drug residue analysis in paraphernalia and syringes program conducted in Adelaide over a 1-year period will be presented to show the extent of illicit use of pharmaceuticals and other drugs and combinations detected over the course of the study.

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A/Prof Janet Sluggett

PSA Lecturer

Associate Professor in Pharmacy and Pharmacoepidemiology and Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia.

A/Prof Janet Sluggett

A/Prof Janet Sluggett (BPharm(Hons), GDip ClinEpid, PhD, FSHP, FANZCAP, GAICD) is an Associate Professor in Pharmacy and Pharmacoepidemiology and Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia. Janet is also an NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow and registered pharmacist. Janet’s research seeks to improve medicines use, safety and effectiveness among older people accessing aged care services, as well as implementing and evaluating pharmacist-led services in this setting. Janet is also a non-executive director with the Australian MedicAlert Foundation and Southern Cross Care SA, NT, VIC.

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Medicines management in aged care: evidence, interventions, and policy impact

Older people living in aged care homes often experience multimorbidity and polypharmacy, and medicines-related problems are common. Optimising medicines management in aged care homes was a key focus of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety and subsequent policy reforms. This presentation will provide an overview of recent studies examining medicines use, safety and effectiveness in aged care homes. It will highlight the value of real-world data in generating timely evidence to inform aged care policy and practice. The presentation will also explore the evaluation of pharmacist-led services and the impact of novel interventions targeting quality use of medicines and improved health outcomes among residents of aged care homes.

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Prof Andrew Wilson AO

Keynote Speaker

Co-Director of Leeder Centre for Health Policy, Economics and Data, The University of Sydney

Prof Andrew Wilson AO

Professor Wilson is Co-Director of the Leeder Centre for Health Policy, Economics and Data and Professor of Public Health in the School of Public Health, at the University of Sydney.

He has 3 decades of involvement in health technology assessment including chairing the PBAC, as a member of the HTA policy and processes review and chairing the Implementation Advisory Group on HTA reforms.

His research interests concern how evidence can better inform decision making in clinical medicine, public health, and health service policy and planning with a specific interest on the prevention and management of chronic disease.

His career includes senior roles in state government health departments and universities, and currently chairs the Board of the NSW Health Clinical Excellence Commission and the Accreditation Advisory Committee of the Australian Health Practitioners Regulatory Agency.

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The Future of the PBS: Balancing equity, access and affordability in the new world order

Now an icon of the Australian health care system, since its conception the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) has experienced controversial episodes. In 1993 a world first legislated requirement was implemented that the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) must assess a medicine as cost-effective to recommend listing on the PBS listing. The flow on consequences of this include the development of a sophisticated health technology assessment process and complicated arrangements to achieve cost-effective prices. Later legislated changes requiring statutory price reductions added further challenges because of impact of falling price of comparators. Concerns have always been present about the dominance cost-effectiveness in the decision-making process and the requirement has not always been comfortable for governments. A more general move for greater involvement of informed consumers in decision making and for greater transparency have also impacted on PBS processes as have patient and clinician expectations of faster access to new medicines. The 2022 National Medicines Policy review followed by the 2024 HTA policy and process review were the first substantive whole-of-systems assessments in over 20 years. The extent to which the response to those reviews can prepare the PBS and its processes to be suitable for stakeholder expectations, new health technologies and their evidentiary support, and the broader international challenges will be the focus of my presentation.

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