As a practising physician, I have reported adverse drug reactions. It is equivalent to putting a note in a bottle and sending it into the ocean. There's no feedback at all.
The second thing is that in the time that I was a senior officer with Health Canada and involved in adverse reaction reporting evaluation and action, in a regulatory sense, I was aware that we in essence had no systems to carefully evaluate adverse drug reactions. A good example would be the case of Prepulsid. When the file was looked at--after I left government and through access to information--to see what had been done at Health Canada regarding reported deaths with Prepulsid, the drug that killed Vanessa Young, the earliest memos were one from the drug company's adverse reaction reporting officer saying, “I think I have five deaths”, and one from Health Canada saying, “I thought there were seven.” And neither of them had looked into any of the deaths.
This is a system where reporting is not the issue. People would report if there were something competent and timely in the way of useful information from Health Canada as a result.