Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, for the member's question.
With respect to safety, first and foremost, the design of all clinical trials is subject to a review and approval by the department to ensure that the trial both achieves its objective in its design and that the patient's safety isn't compromised throughout that.
As the Auditor General pointed out, we needed a better process to identify risks in those trials and figure out which ones to inspect. We have done that. We have instituted standard operating procedures. We have mandatory reporting of adverse events from all clinical trials. We now have a system to prioritize those adverse events so that we can figure out what the significant signals are indicating that we might have to go in to follow up with the sponsor about the design of the trial, or to inform participants or ask the sponsor to inform participants about particular health and safety issues.
We've also developed standard operating procedures that we're in the process of implementing to make sure that we inspect the right clinical trial sites to make sure that they are correctly following their own processes, as per their submission to us. We didn't have that clearly documented; it is now documented. We have a risk-based process for doing this, to identify those we think are of greatest risk, and have trained and are in the process of implementing that procedure.
So we have taken a significant number of steps to protect the health and safety of the participants in the trials and to improve reporting to us. As was noted, we started to make transparent aggregate results of clinical trials, and we won't stop there. We'll continue; that's just the first step.