Chair, committee members, this is an opportunity for us to reaffirm our commitment to patients and to reaffirm our commitment to quality products.
With regard to your question, I might want to go back in time a little bit to November. This is when we received the warning letter.
A warning letter is very important. It is very serious. At Sandoz, we are a health care company operating in a highly regulated environment. It is our responsibility to comply with all regulations. Definitely, it is very important for us to meet the expectations of the regulators.
At that time, there were no shortages. At that time, Sandoz had undertaken a process called “quality transformation” within Sandoz to constantly improve the quality system and to constantly improve internally our manufacturing plant and our quality operation.
The warning letter really put us in a situation where we had to accelerate the remediation activities. It is important we comply with the regulations, so it is important that we improve our quality standards, our quality system. Because of that, we had to consider managing a reduced production. We are still in the December period. When we realized our production was going to be reduced, we decided to clearly make some key decisions.
Number one, in January, our company informed the marketplace and our customers that we would be stopping production of ointments, suppositories, and ophthalmics. In light of the situation, these were less medically necessary products.
In late January, we recognized that we would need to focus all remaining production on medically necessary products. At Sandoz, we have a long list of products. We have over 225 presentations. There are 140 different molecules with a different presentation, for a total of 235. As an example, morphine is one of our products, but we provide morphine in 15 different presentations.
Going back, in late January we worked with HealthPRO, key hospitals, and key pharmacists to identify what would be the most important medically necessary products to produce. At that time, there were no shortages. At that time, we made a decision to suspend from our production, because of our reduced capacity, 74 products. It's not because you suspend 74 products that you're in back order immediately. As a matter of fact, for the majority of those 74 products, we had one month, two months, five months, up to 12 months of supply. So at that time, there were no shortages.
When we went to the market on February 15 to announce there were going to be shortages, we had previously worked with the members of CAPDM to create an allocation system in order to ensure that we would spread the distribution of our products equally to the marketplace. As of February 15, we clearly posted on our website all of the back orders and prospective back orders. After the additional request of Minister Aglukkaq, we voluntarily posted on the two sanctioned Health Canada websites all of our current and perspective back orders.
Thank you.