Evidence of meeting #7 for Health in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was prescribing.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Libby Davies NDP Vancouver East, BC
Do you personally see them? Do representatives still come to visit physicians and say “How about this?” How does that actually work?
President-Elect, Canadian Medical Association
Less and less, and in academic environments where there are learners, it's increasingly strict. Sometimes there's complete prohibition in some of our academic centres; however, in more remote areas they do remain one of the primary sources of information, but I defer to Jamie's expertise.
Associate Executive Director, College of Family Physicians of Canada
We also build in incentives here. We can't control the information that is sent or given to family physicians either by mail, by detailers who drop in, and so on. However, what our members require is a certain number of accredited hours of education in order to maintain their membership in the college and their licence to practise. In fact, it's those accredited hours of education when we do have control over the content and where we can, in fact, quite strictly police the difference between true education and marketing.
November 27th, 2013 / 5:10 p.m.
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Nurses Association
I would just add that actually your licensing body, your regulatory body, also has a role to monitor and look at the practice of prescribing. But it is a clinical decision to use the information that is provided by drug companies. You need to look at it and then use your clinical judgment in terms of what is applicable or not. But a regulatory body would be—
NDP
Libby Davies NDP Vancouver East, BC
Who is actually monitoring it, though, and making sure it's not being abused by the marketing of pharmaceuticals? Is anybody kind of watching that? Is there any system in place? How do we know if it's working or not?
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Nurses Association
It is a good question. The only thing I would add—
Associate Executive Director, College of Family Physicians of Canada
The truth is that, like everybody else in society, our members—the family physicians—are exposed to marketing messages all the time, and they can differentiate between marketing and education. So, in fact, I think that they recognize a hierarchy of information they get from all sources. When information comes to them that is clearly marketing, whether it's a brochure or a visit from an employee of a drug company, they can take the information and process it in that way. When it comes to them as education, they have to be able to believe that it comes from a different source, and it's presented with a different thrust. I think the capacity is there to do that.
Conservative
Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Nurses Association
I think it is a good question. We are planning to provide a document and a copy of our presentation. We will look at that, to see if there is some information we can provide additionally.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Ben Lobb
Thank you very much. That is going to wrap up this portion of our meeting.
I say to any of the people who were here today, and to Dr. Meuser, that if there's anything that came to your mind during the discussion here today that you would like to forward to the clerk of the committee, feel free to do so. I appreciate your frank answers that added to the discussion today.
We're going to suspend for a couple minutes, and then we will get into committee business in camera.
Thank you.
[Proceedings continue in camera]