Health Committee on June 5th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Easter, go ahead, sir.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have two questions, and I see the bells are ringing.

Dr. Bennett asked a question earlier on the ability of Health Canada to communicate with physicians in a rapid and effective way. The process, as I understand it, is very slow at the moment now in case of emergency. I think, Ms. Lamar, she felt that you didn't have enough time to respond or that you didn't get to respond when she was here.

Second, in the interest of time, Mr. Chair, this question is for Mr. Lee.

I've had experiences with family members who are on a fairly extensive drug regime. When there are new drugs added, general practitioners will say, “Okay, we'll go with a new drug.” I can tell you about one experience in which a person was on 28 pills—I don't know how many drugs—and after a near-death experience and after review, that dropped to 12 pills a day, and the person was a changed person. There was an adverse reaction to one drug with another which created severe problems.

Is there anything in this bill that will deal with that situation? Sometimes it's not just a certain drug, but it is the application of that drug in conjunction with other remedies that are being taken by the individual.

Those are my two questions, with the first one for Ms. Lamar.

[Anne Lamar]

Thank you for the question.

Coming back to some of my earlier comments, I think one of the things that we have working in our favour now is that we work in an environment that has an enormous number of venues for communication. There are many platforms to communicate, and social media is very helpful and instrumental in getting our communication messages out.

In terms of when we do have health and safety information that we need to pass along, we really take a system-wide approach. We are not only communicating with physicians. Of course, practitioners are our key target audience for us, but we also use the College of Physicians network, for example, and pharmacists and retailers as well. We try to reach out to organizations that are also having face-to-face interaction where products are sold. In the case of a recall for example, we also work with retailers and pharmacists who are actually distributing that product so they are also aware.

We actually do fairly regular evaluations, if I can call it that, of our risk communications processes to ensure that they are effective, that they're timely and that we are meeting the needs of those we provide them to. We have numerous ways of communicating electronically. We use old-fashioned technology, networks and phones, as well. We also do a lot of direct interaction with health care practitioners.

[David Lee]

On the second question about a new drug coming in and a person taking many drugs, that can happen. Clinical trials don't always tell us how the therapies will react together.

I think one of the big promises from the proposals is the institutional reporting, because as patients go in and they're taking a number of medications, seeing that very early is very important, so if there is a reaction between a new drug coming out and other drugs that are already out there, we can try to pick that up. The quality of reporting could increase in that environment.

Right now, if you get an adverse reaction and then you look at it, the patient could be on four or five drugs, and have a number of medical conditions. It's hard, looking at that, to tell what happened. These new powers of being able to follow up and really study and verify and to do it in a disciplined way is really what we're trying to move through in Vanessa's law.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

To come back to Ms. Lamar, there is no question there are all kinds of platforms out there to communicate now, but in an emergency situation, one needs to ensure the message gets through. If I can use even MPs as an example, we have so many platforms now for people to communicate with us, we sometimes miss them. Somebody thought they'd get to you on Facebook, or somebody else thought they'd get to you on Twitter, while somebody else thought they would get to you through your website or by e-mail. With all these different channels of communications, what we find in our racket—and it's not to be critical of the health area—is sometimes the messages can be missed.

Is there any emergency line or tool of communication that is being looked at or could there be improvements that you can think of?

[Anne Lamar]

I'm going to ask Dr. Sharma to provide you with some more details.

[Dr. Supriya Sharma]

To start, I think you're absolutely right. When the bill first came in, there was no Twitter; there was no Facebook. People got information in very different ways. It's still that way, I think. When we're talking with practitioners and physicians out in the community, people want to get information in different ways. We've now gotten to the point where there are so many different platforms and different places where you can get that information. That's why at Health Canada what we're doing around the drug products is we're really trying to consolidate all that information.

One of the initiatives as part of the transparency initiative is something we're calling the drug product register. It actually will take all that information and put it in one place. When we have emergency information that we need to get out to practitioners, we have an e-mail push. People subscribe to that, if that's the way that they want to get the information. We have the Healthy Canadians website now and things get tweeted out.

Also, if we really need to reach all practitioners, we do have resources that we can go to that actually keep repositories of information for all practitioners across Canada. In that emergency setting, if we need to do that, we can do that.

The issue for us, though, is what is the most effective way to communicate. It may be through existing channels. We're doing a lot of work on the effectiveness of risk communications, going out to end users to ask how they want to get information and what's useful to them. Then we'll package it accordingly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ben Lobb]

Thank you very much.

That's going to conclude this portion of our meeting.

I'd like to thank all our witnesses here and guests. We're going to suspend for a minute. We're going to come back in camera. I would ask all those that shouldn't be here for an in camera meeting to leave as quickly as they can and we'll get into the portion of our in camera meeting.

Thank you.

[Proceedings continue in camera]