Health committee  Mr. Chair, one of the things that pharmacists have been trying to do over the past several years is to advocate with their provincial governments to increase the scope of practice, increase the service they can provide to patients. In pretty much every jurisdiction in this countr

Health committee  Thank you. When we posed that question to Health Canada officials, I think it was made very clear that hospitals would be considered, but beyond that we're into some grey territory. As I said in my comments, there was an open question. For example, would a prescribed institution

Health committee  The challenge with broadening the scope of the definition is whether these institutions will have the human resources and the capability to in fact do the work necessary to report these. In theory it would be advantageous for all of these various institutions to report on such

Health committee  Thank you for the question, Ms. Adams. I identified in my opening comments a number of the aspects of the bill of which we are extremely supportive. I'll just mention some of those. First of all is the inclusion of increasing penalties on those manufacturers who essentially wil

Health committee  I would to add that we've consulted with our board, with our provincial pharmacists associations, and with individual members. When the bill was introduced back in December, we issued a public statement. As many of the members around this table know, we've worked on various issu

Health committee  Thank you, Ms. Davies, for the question. I would add that polls show that pharmacists are the most trusted profession in Canada and are the most accessible health care providers. You are correct in that. With respect to the question regarding NHPs, Ms. Long detailed quite exte

Health committee  It tends to be lower. We would argue that if that were the case, that the risk is significantly lower, then by including NHPs within the bill, there's probably not a lot they would need to worry about. However, the risk still does exist. I think what Bill C-17 does is to ackn

Health committee  I'll ask my colleague Dr. Power to address that.

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good morning to the committee. Thank you to the Standing Committee on Health for the invitation to appear this morning. My name is Jeff Morrison. I'm director of government relations and public affairs with the Canadian Pharmacists Association. With me—I

Health committee  There are currently bills before the Senate and, I believe, the House that would mandate or regulate that relationship. At present it is primarily a voluntary relationship that's been built up over several years. With respect to the presidential order last year, it allowed the FD

Health committee  Yes. I had a great conversation with the acting director of compliance in the FDA, and I asked that exact question: “What do you do?” The FDA claims that in 2011 they alleviated roughly 190 to 195 shortages, so clearly they're doing something right. What they said is that when

Health committee  Thank you very much for the question, and yes, we're aware of that letter. In fact, I wrote that letter. We've been supportive of the voluntary system really from the get-go. In fact, we put together that working group. We brought together the organizations that are signatories

Health committee  What we've been talking about in the media, in particular—and I think we're referring to the role of Health Canada—are the items Dr. Poston spoke about in his presentation, which is what role Health Canada and the federal government can play in responding to shortages, not with r