Human Resources committee  Good afternoon. Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before this committee to discuss ways to ensure an adequate supply of physicians in the Canadian health care system. The reality today is that nearly five million Canadians do not have family physicians, includin

Health committee  I think you need to involve them, but it's a reactive thing. This is a palliative approach. The issue of shortages and how you manage them is part of the problem, and part of the solution, as you correctly point out, is to involve pharmacists and physicians. Really, at the momen

Health committee  I think it's rocuronium, Rick. I think it's one of your wake-up medicines.

Health committee  Looking at it from a patient's perspective, they don't have a grasp of the niceties of jurisdictional disputes. They really don't understand how it is that the drugs they get actually get to them. To be perfectly honest, before these last few weeks, I was pretty well completely i

Health committee  I have a couple of things in no particular order. I think it's heartening that you seem to be getting to the bottom of some of big pharma's issues, or the pharmaceutical industries' issues with their processes. As I say, it's a black box to me, and I've tried to open that unsucce

Health committee  I'd love to know what's going on.

Health committee  I can't find out.

Health committee  I beg to differ because I've actually tried.

Health committee  If I may respond, that group, the working party that sent the letter.... You're right. Events have overtaken us. The bottom line with that group is quite simply that we were there to provide the health care provider and the patient's perspective to a group that did not have that

Health committee  I'd turn that question around and be a bit cheeky. Imagine you're a patient lying there with acute appendicitis. They really don't care why the antibiotic isn't there or why their pain meds aren't there. That's for you guys to fix. We need some leadership in terms of whatever l

Health committee  I take your point. I think to be fair, and this is a slightly different perspective, it's a collaborative endeavour. The analogy that was used in an article recently about the blind men feeling the elephant and each getting a piece of it, that kind of resembles the provinces in t

Health committee  I'll take a stab at that. Thank you. I think there are two things that need to happen simultaneously. One is you have to remedy the gap that's there at the moment. I don't have any handle on what's in the supply chain. I don't know anything about the business of manufacturing dr

Health committee  Good morning. I want to begin by thanking the committee for the opportunity to appear before you on behalf of the Canadian Medical Association. The CMA also submitted a brief to the committee. On behalf of the 76,000 doctors represented by the CMA, and the millions of Canadia

Finance committee  There is some evidence that health care delivery at the provincial level suffered considerably in the nineties. It was squeezed from a variety of points of view, not just fiscal. There was also the unfortunate exercise of cutting medical school enrollments, so we were nowhere nea

Finance committee  My area of expertise is really health care, so I don't know that I can answer all of your question. In terms of health care budget, there's a lot of evidence that would suggest the money we're spending at the moment isn't getting us the value for money that you would think it sho