Health committee  I actually don't think that's one of our recommendations. I'm wondering if that's more Ada's recommendation from her group.

Health committee  Thank you, and I'm happy to answer that. Initially, our work began as information and data gathering from groups with lived experience in high risk areas and the focus group information from treating professionals and front-line workers. What we recognized at that time was there

Health committee  No, it's not.

Health committee  It's a very good question. It's an issue affecting first world countries. It does not happen in second or third world countries. I completely agree with your reflection and comment that it's related to availability. As medications have become more available and physicians have b

Health committee  I think that Dr. Selby would be in a very good position to answer that. I'd suggest posing it to him, if that's okay with the chair.

Health committee  Thank you for your questions. My understanding is that you had two parts to this. Number one is what would be required from a funding point of view to support the work. Number two is the issue about the Ritalin and the sampling. I think the most important thing is to first of

Health committee  I think the more important thing is to look at how much it would cost to put together a surveillance system and to standardize some of the prescription monitoring programs. Some of that work is occurring through the national prescription drug abuse strategy. They have an implemen

Health committee  Our prescription monitoring program data in Alberta has been in place since 1986. About four or five years ago, we developed analytic tools to be able to mine our data, so we can actually create geographic mapping for Alberta. We can look down to population subzones at the rate

Health committee  Currently there isn't an obligation to do it because there may not be any reason to be concerned. If somebody is coming in for antibiotics or you've got a very low risk patient who's on a very small amount of medication, we can't require nor would it be recommended to create barr

Health committee  It depends on the province. Many provinces do have prescription monitoring programs. In Alberta we have something called the triplicate program. I think we have a very good program in a lot of ways, because we have a provincial health record, which all physicians have the ability

Health committee  It's difficult, because currently we don't have a lot of good data so we don't know the full scope of it. If we look at the International Narcotics Control Board data, Canada is one of the highest—I believe it was the highest in 2011—prescriber or consumer per capita of Ritalin.

Health committee  What have we learned in the last five years of being part of CoOPDM? We have learned that prescription drug misuse affects everyone, every community, every demographic. It is not about marginalized populations. Jodie Bruketa could be the daughter of anyone here, so this is an iss

Health committee  I'm Susan Ulan. I'm a family physician by training, and I work with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta. We're the regulatory body that oversees the practice of medicine in Alberta. As part of my portfolio, I'm involved with physician prescribing practices, and I'm