General information
This guide is based on publicly available information from official sources, including the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Services Australia, Healthdirect and other Australian Government health and pharmacy bodies. It is general information, not personal medical advice, and may change over time. With any medicine, always read the label and use only as directed, and if symptoms persist see your doctor or health care professional. Check anything that affects you with your pharmacist or GP. In an emergency, call 000.
A community pharmacy is the local, public-facing pharmacy you visit on a main street, in a shopping centre, or in a medical precinct. It dispenses Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and private prescriptions, sells over-the-counter medicines, gives vaccinations, and offers a growing list of health services. Australia has close to 6,000 community pharmacies, and almost all of them are owned by a registered pharmacist, because that is what the law requires (Pharmacy Guild of Australia). For a wider view of how to choose one for your situation, see our guide to finding a pharmacy in Australia.
What is a community pharmacy?
What sets a community pharmacy apart is who it serves and what it can hand over the counter. It is open to the general public, and it can supply the Schedule 2 and Schedule 3 medicines a pharmacist keeps behind or beside the counter, the ones sold without a doctor's prescription.
It is not the same as a hospital pharmacy, which dispenses only for that hospital's own patients, or a compounding-only or wholesale pharmacy, which prepares or supplies medicines rather than serving the public. A community pharmacy holds a state premises licence, employs at least one registered pharmacist, and takes part in the PBS under the Community Pharmacy Agreement, the funding deal the federal Department of Health, Disability and Ageing renegotiates with the sector roughly every five years to set dispensing fees and funded services (Community Pharmacy Agreement, health.gov.au).
Who is allowed to own a pharmacy?
Australia regulates pharmacy ownership more tightly than almost any other kind of shop, through two layers of rules.
The first is who may own one. State and territory pharmacy law requires a community pharmacy to be owned by a registered pharmacist, a small partnership of pharmacists, or a company that is wholly pharmacist-owned. On top of that, the federal approval to dispense PBS medicines, granted under section 90 of the National Health Act 1953, is issued to a registered pharmacist rather than to a company (Establish a new pharmacy, health.gov.au). Together these mean a supermarket, a listed retail chain, or an overseas investor cannot hold a pharmacy's PBS approval. The reasoning is clinical: the person accountable for the business is the same person accountable for the dispensing inside it.
The second layer is where a new pharmacy may open. The pharmacy location rules, administered by the Australian Community Pharmacy Authority (ACPA), set distance and proximity criteria between approved PBS pharmacies and limit new approvals near supermarkets and medical centres (Establish a new pharmacy, health.gov.au). The aim is to keep pharmacies viable in smaller suburbs and country towns rather than clustered in one busy precinct.
| Type of pharmacy | Who it serves | What makes it different |
|---|---|---|
| Community | The general public | The everyday pharmacy, for prescriptions, over-the-counter medicines, and services like vaccinations |
| Hospital | A hospital's own patients | Serves admitted, emergency, and clinic patients only, stocks high-cost specialty medicines, and sells nothing to the public |
| Online | The public, by delivery | A community pharmacy with online ordering and delivery, tied to a licensed physical pharmacy |
General information drawn from publicly available sources, which can change. Check anything that affects your situation with your pharmacist.
Our find a pharmacy guide covers how to choose between the three.
What services can you expect?
Almost every community pharmacy offers a core set of services: PBS and private dispensing, over-the-counter Schedule 2 and Schedule 3 medicines, pharmacist advice, adult flu vaccinations, blood pressure checks, and take-home naloxone through the federal program that supplies it free.
Staying with the same pharmacy over time means someone who can look across everything you take and catch a problem between medicines, which is what makes a medicines review or a weekly pack work well.
Beyond that, the list varies by pharmacy, by state, and by the pharmacist's training. Many pharmacies also offer dose administration aids (the weekly blister packs, see our Webster packs and dose administration aids guide), a MedsCheck or a Home Medicines Review, travel vaccinations, opioid dependence treatment, a needle and syringe program, or compounding. Under state-based pharmacist prescribing programs, a pharmacist may in some states treat an uncomplicated urinary tract infection or continue a contraceptive prescription, with the scope set by each state health department. What you can get depends on which state you are in and which pharmacy you walk into, so it is worth using the service filter on Pharmacy Finder to see what is offered near you.
Who regulates and represents community pharmacies?
Three national bodies stand behind community pharmacy, and they are easy to mix up. The Pharmacy Guild of Australia represents pharmacy owners as businesses; it negotiates the Community Pharmacy Agreement with the government and runs the accreditation program that most pharmacies hold. The Pharmacy Board of Australia, which sits under the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), does something quite different: it registers and regulates individual pharmacists as practitioners. The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia (PSA) is the third, representing pharmacists as professionals rather than owners. In short, the Guild speaks for the businesses, the Board regulates the people, and the PSA supports the profession.
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Frequently asked questions
In everyday Australian speech, yes. "Chemist" is the informal word for the place and "pharmacy" the formal one, while the pharmacist is the registered professional working inside it. Our pharmacist versus chemist guide explains why both words remain in use.
