Health committee  I think we're all in agreement on that.

Health committee  I think we all agree with that. With the difficulties that have been encountered in the hospital setting, the electronic record is definitely where we need to go. How easy is it to implement? In a small hospital like ours, we have 3,000 staff people. Of those 3,000, probably 1,50

Health committee  Thirteen years ago I absolutely would not have turned on a computer; I would not have been able to turn on a computer. Now my question to myself every day is, “How did I ever work without it?” You need to evolve into it. When you're teaching clinicians to be clinicians, you're n

Health committee  There are 23,000 medications.

Health committee  Within my province of New Brunswick, we're currently at the level where all of our health regions will soon be tied in through these electronic health records, which makes us extremely happy. We are looking at moving outside of just the institutions and including physicians' offi

Health committee  My answer to your question is that we all think it's very important and that there is definitely a problem. And yes, we're not reporting everything that needs to be reported, and that is also a problem. But it's such a wide spectrum, as indicated by the oncologists in the room. W

Health committee  In my real-life world I'm a drug information pharmacist. What I do is evaluate information as it comes forward to me. We find one of the important things in terms of being able to support our clinicians is that they do get access to real-life information as quickly as possible. S

Health committee  You're talking about the Beers list. There are drug information resources out there that do have disease-class drug interaction types of programs. They are available.

Health committee  I guess I hesitate. The Beers list is one that we recognize, but we also recognize that it's not a black and white issue. Unfortunately, that's the problem with the practice of medicine. Yes, the list is there. Yes, we know that patients at risk will have greater risk with these

Health committee  No.

Health committee  I'm going to comment on that. My original reaction to mandatory reporting of adverse events by all health professionals was a negative response, primarily because I felt it was going to add more noise than quality to the reporting. Part of my concern was that we may end up with

Health committee  That's going to be a challenge. There is also the challenge of having to re-educate people. Health providers, people who've been out working for decades, were not taught how to report adverse events. We knew it was part of our review of the patient, whether it be lack of efficacy

Health committee  I'm going to add a comment to that. One of the recommendations from the Expert Advisory Committee at our last meeting was exactly that statement. Instead of going very broad to begin with, let's start small; let's try to work through the bugs and see what will work and what won'

Health committee  That is a significant problem, particularly in the older drugs that have been on the market for several years. Most of these drugs are not even available through the originating company or industry that actually created the molecule. Aspirin comes to mind. It's ancient, yet it's

Health committee  I think it has to be multi-factorial. I think it belongs within industry, to a degree, and it belongs with the clinicians, to a degree. We're treating our patients for various reasons with various products. We are all included in this. I don't see it as any one specific group's r