My name is Irfan Aslam, and I will go on with another recommendation.
Recommendation five is to ensure that Canadians are informed of any pharmaceutical product approval and non-approval in an open-access system that includes a summary of the rationale for approval or non-approval and supportive data. The consumer can then make an informed choice, along with their health care providers, as to future use.
As a member from the Canadian Medical Association suggested, the clinical trial data should be available to researchers who are conducting the research and also to Health Canada. Once we have all the available information in one place, it would make it easier to see what additional information is needed. Then action can be taken as to the safety of the drug.
Recommendation six is to provide evidence-based information in an efficient manner. We are living in an age of information technology, and I think the best way to perform this task is by having an e-learning tool for pharmaceutical education. The tool would be web-based e-learning for patients and health care professionals. It would include the correct way of taking medication, some dos and don'ts, and links to government web pages and different community supports so patients and health care professionals could learn more about the medications.
The next recommendation is about adverse event reporting. Currently, health care professionals are not obliged to report any adverse event. This can be changed. However, it should only be changed once the other pieces of the post-market surveillance system are in place. When we have all the other systems there to support the health care professional, you might want to consider making it mandatory, but it should not be done at this time.
The next recommendation is about the capacity for monitoring, surveillance, and research. We feel that more can be done in the area of monitoring non-prescription drugs, or what are called over-the-counter medications. One way to address this problem would be event monitoring. According to the British Medical Journal, many health professionals and researchers in England have found that prescription event monitoring provides a valuable addition to pharmacovigilance of prescription products in England. Many pharmacies have put in place the electronic linkage of computerized patient drug records and point-of-sale systems. This linkage could allow the systematic collection of data on the use of non-prescription medications, which might be a useful tool for monitoring over-the-counter medications.
Now, with all these recommendations and the recommendations that have been put forward by other colleagues, you might be able to come up with the best post-market surveillance program for pharmaceutical products. However, such a program will be useless unless you have enough personnel to implement the program. So our last recommendation is to recruit more health care professionals--doctors, nurses and people in Health Canada--to analyze the reported information. That would ensure that the proper implementation of any post-market surveillance of our pharmaceutical product program would be possible.
We would like to thank you for your time in hearing us today, and we hope you find some of our recommendations useful as part of your blueprint for renewal. We look forward to answering any questions today and in future.
Again, many thanks to the committee. Thank you.