Thank you very much for the invitation to speak on this important matter.
My name is Steve Morgan. I'm an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia's Centre for Health Services and Policy Research. CHSPR, as it's known, is one of Canada's academic repositories for administrative health care data. By tracking the use of medicines, physician services, hospital care, and other services in the health care domain, our research centre is one of the centres in Canada that's able to study the organization and delivery of health care and its impact on the health of populations.
This is an example of what I will refer to as the Canadian advantage in post-market evaluation of the safety and effectiveness of medicines, and I'll return to that Canadian advantage in a minute.
In addition to being a member of the centre's faculty, I am the lead of the program on pharmaceutical policy. Our program is an interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers, trainees, and even policy-makers who are interested in pharmaceutical policy across the entire life course of pharmaceuticals.