From this week, Government rules have been changed to ensure medicines like Ozempic and Trulicity are available for the people who need them most.

These medicines are called glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists or GLP-1 RAs.

When the government began subsidising GLP-1 RAs they could only be available if you were being treated with other diabetes medicines  (like metformin, insulin, etc) and the other medicines weren’t working to reduce your blood glucose, or you had a reaction. However, data shows that people were being prescribed GLP-1 RAs outside of these rules.

In order to deal with this, the rules have been changed to:

• Increase access by only requiring one other medicine to have been tried (e.g. metformin), and
• Require doctors to get phone authorization before they can prescribe GLP-1 RAs to new users.

If you’re already on Ozempic or another GLP-1 RA and it is funded through the government, these new rules shouldn’t affect you. We know that GLP-1 RAs are in short supply, and we don’t think these rules will have an immediate effect on your ability to get access to these medicines.

More information is available from the PBS website.