First of all, Madam Chair, thank you very much for the invitation to come here and discuss some of the issues.
Our coalition is an alliance of 27 health charities and individuals who are advocating for better health care around access to medications, including the drug shortages and safety and supply.
I just want to touch base, so you get the context. Our submission is available through bestmedicines.ca, if you don't already have it and for those others who are listening.
We cover chronic illness for as many as 20 million Canadians. This is a huge number, and I just need you to listen to some of the diseases we cover: arthritis, asthma, breast cancer, epilepsy, hemophilia, pain, skin disease, intestinal—which I represent with gastrointestinal—and liver disease. Other coalitions are also members of our coalition, so we kind of stand as the figurehead across the country. There are coalitions within Alberta and British Columbia that also represent a whole number of other disease areas. We also have kidney cancer, lymphoma, ovarian cancer, and Tourette's, just to cover off some of the core illnesses.
We really are here to just remind everyone that the object of the exercise here is patients. If we didn't have patients, we wouldn't need drugs, and drugs are clearly what we're talking about today. We're looking to the government to take a role in that, a very active leadership role. We're looking for an in-depth study on what really went wrong and solutions. But in saying that we're looking for the government to take a leadership role, we're asking, please, for patients to be at the table, because if you don't get feedback, that intrinsic natural kind of feedback from the actual end users of a product, then you're probably missing a huge piece of the information you need.
So we're asking to be there all the way along, from figuring out what went wrong to looking at possible solutions, and we're looking for pragmatic solutions because we're patients and we want it to work. We don't want to look at lots of regulations and things like that. We want something that's going to be working and will pay attention.
The drug shortage issue is not just a recent issue. In gastrointestinal disease, we had this issue in 2006, 2009, and again recently. It is an issue that keeps coming up, and it has obviously come to a head because it has affected perhaps more groups recently, but it is really a critical thing.
We are absolutely looking for patient involvement. We have a couple of examples in our submission, but we actually have way more than what is in our submission. I just want to take a minute and ask my colleague, Suzanne, if it's okay with the chair, to give one example of epilepsy.
Can we switch and allow my colleague to say something at this point?