Thank you.
Good afternoon, members of the Standing Committee on Health and Mr. Chair.
As associate executive director of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and as a practising family physician, I'm privileged to be with you today and I thank you for the invitation.
The College of Family Physicians of Canada, the CFPC, is the voice of family medicine in Canada and we represent over 30,000 dedicated members. The CFPC advocates on behalf of its members to ensure high quality in the delivery of care. Education is, of course, a key element of our mandate. We establish standards for the training, certification, and ongoing education of family physicians and we're responsible for accrediting post-graduate family medicine training in all of Canada's 17 schools.
My remarks today concern the role that family physicians can play to address prescription drug abuse and misuse and how we can work with patients to find the common ground required to resolve the situations in which there is prescription drug misuse.
Prescription drugs are clearly an important part of managing disease, of curing illness, and of maintaining function. All of us at one point or another are likely to require a prescription of antibiotics, for example for an infection. Some drugs are prescribed for the short term; some for a longer period, such as pain management medications or some antidepressants. Some are required for the duration of a person's life, for example thyroid hormone supplementation in the case of under-functioning or surgical removal of the thyroid gland. Indeed, a 2007 Commonwealth Fund survey found that about half of all Canadian adults take at least one prescription drug on a regular basis.
Because of our place in the health system, family physicians are largely at the centre of prescribing--