Thank you very much.
My first question here, then, has to do with wait times.
According to New Zealand Medicines, the wait time in New Zealand is actually 2.4 years on average from the time that a drug comes to market until it can actually be approved for this schedule. That's a lot of time. I looked on online and compared other countries, and it's actually the greatest wait time of any nation. In Canada, in comparison, the average wait time is 464 days. That's about half the amount of time that it takes New Zealand to approve a drug and get it out to patients.
That is a very significant difference and appears to be very detrimental to the health of patients and their access to the medicines they need. When we're talking about increasing patients' access to medicines and making sure that patients have what they need to take care of their health, this seems to be very detrimental.
I'd like your comments on that. Do you feel that it is beneficial to patients to have such a long wait time?