Thanks, Mr. Chair. If you would be kind enough, please alert me to the last two minutes so that I might split my time with Mr. Young, because I know he's keen to get some questions in to these witnesses.
If I might just pick up on what my colleague Mr. Lizon had said, I've had the very same experience when I've travelled through eastern Europe. If you're ill, you present yourself to the pharmacist and much like the traditional apothecaries, they would look and actually give you the medication you require and you're on your way. It seemed very efficient—just very, very efficient and very, very convenient.
While I understand what Ms. Fry has been indicating about the need to make sure that we're obviously not over-prescribing opioids and all sorts of other serious medications, I do think that there is an opportunity with expanded scope of practice to offer innovation and savings to the health care system and added convenience to Canadians across the country. I think especially, for instance, to experiences when my son would have an asthma attack at night and I would run out of refills for his puffers. It would have been so handy to just go straight to the pharmacy and have them refill the puffer. Instead I had to hike and try to find a 24-hour clinic that would give me a prescription that I could then take, and my son is in distress the entire time. I think that there are opportunities for savings here and convenience for consumers.
I also think what a terrible waste it is when people are about to travel, for instance, and they're taking up valuable physician time when they're simply seeking prophylactic antibiotics if they're about to go to some country. I think there is certainly an opportunity there where our pharmacies could play a role, where you do have laid out for you that these are the types of medications you ought to be taking with you. I'm thinking of some basic things like Cipro if you're going to go somewhere. Instead, what we find right now, though, is people are sitting in doctors' offices taking time and very limited, valuable resources. I think we've all had that experience, where you're sitting in the doctor's office and you're waiting, and these things I think could be more conveniently dealt with elsewhere.
I wonder, you know, just following up on Ms. Davies' question, how open is this renewing and extending prescriptions and so on? I wasn't familiar with it here in Ontario. I didn't think that you could just go to a pharmacy and have a prescription renewed.