At the risk of offending my colleagues to the right--I'm just teasing--of course the work we're doing needs more funding, and there is opportunity to use both a spontaneous reporting system and a targeted surveillance system to identify drug reactions of concern and, most importantly, solutions to these problems.
I feel that we talk a lot about identifying the reactions--identifying reactions, getting reports. It's not enough. We don't report as doctors, as nurses, as pharmacists--even as consumers--because, what is it? At the end of the day, it's a report. It's sent to Health Canada, and no one is quite sure how this is going to be used to improve the safe use of medication for the very next patient who comes to the hospital or into a medical practice environment. We need solutions, and that's what I think needs to be part of this.
I agree with a progressive product life cycle approach for advancing our understanding of drugs over time, but it has to be directed at improving safety. It has to be directed at that. There have to be solutions identified now, a priori, that we will seek to actually embed into the practice of health care so that we'll no longer just be reporting for reporting's sake.