Evidence of meeting #117 for Veterans Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was drug.
A recording is available from Parliament.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
How is it different? If you can only tell me about the serving members, I'm happy with that.
BGen Andrew Downes
I'll tell you about the serving members. For serving members who are concerned about their symptoms and wondering if they may be related to mefloquine, they need to see one of their health care providers—whether that's a physician or a psychologist or what have you—in order to start the discussion on what the concerns are, what the symptoms are, to ask about the exposure to mefloquine, when it was taken, etc., to try to understand the circumstance.
The next step would be potentially a referral to specialists to help manage some of the other symptoms that might be identified, and then treatment would be provided based on the symptoms.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
One of the other things you said earlier today was around tracking. My colleague asked some questions about how we track and how we know. It seems there's some confusion there. I'm just wondering if that has improved. What's being done to sort of look historically and bring forward that information. It seems to me that Canadians want to know, and people who have served their country, whether they're still serving or now are veterans, want to know that information. It's a little frustrating to have this sort of nebulous “we don't know for sure” answer.
BGen Andrew Downes
It's true that we do not have a registry of people who have taken mefloquine. We don't have a formal process by which we're tracking people as a group.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Is that improving at all? Today we're dealing with mefloquine, but what if in the future we're dealing with something else? Is there any work being done to get these records a little more clear and systematic so that we can find that information when we need to?
BGen Andrew Downes
As I mentioned earlier, we have an electronic health record and we can access information in that health record, but what we don't have is a specific registry of people, a list of names with their symptoms and tests done.
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Do you have anything that talks about medication received?
BGen Andrew Downes
The place we could access that is through the system I mentioned earlier, which we've had in place for perhaps 10 years. I don't remember the exact date.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
From what I understand you are saying, basically, 10 years back, if there was a medication identified as something we should be concerned about, we would be able to pull out a list of people who accessed that medication so that we could address it in the future in this country.
BGen Andrew Downes
I believe we can do that. Certainly we could go through each person, but I'm not sure whether we could just do a data extraction and come up with a list. I'm not 100% sure of that, but I suspect it's possible.
NDP
Rachel Blaney NDP North Island—Powell River, BC
Is there a way we could find out if that's the case? Could you get that back to the committee at some point?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Neil Ellis
That ends our round. I don't know whether anybody had any more questions. We have some time left if anybody does. If not, then I'll thank the witnesses, following which we have to pass a budget.
On behalf of the committee, I thank everybody for attending today and helping to enlighten us on this topic. Thank you for all you do for the men and women who are serving and have served.
Everybody has a budget in front of them. Perhaps you've had a chance to look at it.
I need a motion to pass it.
Okay, Mr. Eyolfson.
Are there any questions on the budget?
(Motion agreed to)
There is a motion to adjourn from Mr. Harvey.
(Motion agreed to)