Thank you, sir.
As was mentioned, when I arrived at the department 18 months ago, there was no pharmacist. I saw that as a gap to the good functioning of the formulary review committee.
We hired a very experienced pharmacist from the Canadian Forces and started right away to put in some procedures to tighten the decision-making that was identified by the Auditor General. We had identified that even before the report came out. Ms. Vesterfelt sits on the Canadian drug review committee of the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technology in Health. She also sits on several other committees that are all pan-provincial and federal. Her role mainly is to provide analysis and advice to the department, but also to the formulary review committee.
Everything that is presented now needs to be analyzed before it's presented for consideration, and we've established guiding principles. Before, I would say the decisions that were made at the formulary review committee were not made willy-nilly, but the process could have been more rigorous. One of the recommendations from the OAG noted that there was a lack of documentation. Now we have written analysis of items that are presented to the committee for consideration, and they are part now of the records of decisions of the committee so that we have a trail showing how we came to consider this. Among the guiding principles is the principle of cost-effectiveness, so an economic analysis is done for every new item that's brought to committee.