Mr. Speaker, the Liberal Party will be supporting the bill. We think it is timely.
I listened to my hon. colleague, the parliamentary secretary, use terms like “needless”. This bill, which intends to deal in a real way with drug shortages, is not needless at all. I will tell members why later on.
The parliamentary secretary talked about bureaucratic big government. I do not think this is bureaucratic and big government. In fact, it is bureaucracy that is standing in the way of the kinds of processes we need to get drugs out into the community as soon as possible.
We should not be referring to Sandoz in any positive light. It was Sandoz that cost communities for intravenous anesthetics in the hospitals. It was a huge problem for everyone. It catapulted this problem onto the front pages of the newspapers and onto centre stage.
However, this is not something new. The college of pharmacists and the Canadian Pharmacists Association identified this problem in 2010, saying that about 90% of pharmacists had a difficult time filling prescriptions, because they could not find the drugs they needed. At that time, about 58% of physicians said that they actually could not find the drugs they needed and had to look for substitutions.
That was in 2010. We, as Liberals, had a round table with all the stakeholders and came up with a good sense of the situation in Canada. We knew that this was not just a Canadian problem. This is also linked to global shortages of drugs in terms of raw materials, et cetera.
We also watched the United States deal with this problem in a different way than Canada did. The Food and Drug Administration in the United States identified the problem back in 2010, just as Canada did. The President created a group of 11 extra people within the Food and Drug Administration to work solely on drug shortages. They were to identify upcoming shortages before they actually occurred, look for alternatives for those drugs at an early stage so that patients could get them when they needed them, and look at whether there was collusion at all in the drug industry with regard to shortages.
We know that a lot of these shortages are from generic companies. Many of the drugs we are talking about are old tried and true drugs that have been in the pharmacopoeia for physicians, patients, and pharmacists for the last 30 years. Now they are no longer being made, in many instances, because they are not profitable, and they cannot find the raw materials, et cetera.
It is not a needless problem or a needless intervention the parliamentary secretary referred to.
Here is what has happened since 2010, when pharmacists and doctors identified this problem. In 2012, since the government has taken the steps the parliamentary secretary talked about, the situation has worsened. Now 95% of pharmacists say that they have trouble trying to get the drugs that are prescribed, and 68% of physicians, an increase from 52%, are now saying that this is a problem for them in treating their patients.
What happens when patients cannot get a drug that has been working for them and is being prescribed? First, physicians have to find an alternative. That is very difficult to do if one does not know in advance. For people who understand about drugs and about patient care, they will know that they cannot suddenly, even if they could find an alternative, switch a drug right away in a day. One has to be weaned from the drug. One has find out if the alternative will work for the patient. The patient may get side effects from that alternative. In the meantime, what happens when patients cannot get access to the drugs they need is that they get very sick and go to the ER. That is a cost to the system. That also makes them enter hospital for a period of time while they try being put on a new drug without consequences. That takes up hospital beds. We find that it backs up the system. Patients can get worse in terms of the progression of illnesses.
We see that this is a real problem in terms of patient care. It is not just something on a piece of paper. The pharmacists and doctors are flagging this as a real problem for patient care.
We are suggesting that we do something about it, in spite of the voluntary reporting system. No one is suggesting that it is not done in good faith. In an ideal world, all drug companies would say that they think they are going to have shortages and that they will happen in six months, and they will flag them early. However, they do not.
This is not an ideal world. It has shown over three years that the system of voluntary reporting has not worked. It is time to go into a mandatory system. It is time to identify beforehand. It is time to look at what the United States has been doing successfully with this drug shortage problem, listen to it and maybe learn something.
Do we listen to best practices? No, but we should look at them. We should see that at the end of the day, this is not about the industry. This is about patient care. This is about people having access to the drugs they need when they need them.
Let me give the House an example. Hospital pharmacists and people who are treating patients for terminal illness and for certain cancers have found that some of the chemotherapy treatment obviously has side effects. The drugs to treat those side effects are now no longer easily available. The other drugs that they might used have far more side effects than they would want in a patient who has cancer or a terminal illness. Again, we are finding that people are unable to use the substitutions.
Epilepsy is another example. If people do not have the drugs that they have been taking for many years, which have been out there in the marketplace for a long time and have worked for many epileptics, and if they cannot find them, they have to go on to newer drugs that may or may not work for them and that may have many side effects for them, causing them to get sicker. By the way, if they do not get the drug and they have to wait for two weeks, the problem for patients is that they can start going back into epileptic seizures, when they had been controlled for 20 or 30 years.
This is an issue of patient care. The government does not have to continue with the voluntary measures that it has used and that have been shown to not work. We are talking about evidence here. If we had it for three years and it is making things worse, fix it. What is the big problem? I do not believe that if the United States is able to get industry to work with government and mandate certain things without industry getting mad at it, the government has taken a strong step forward. People there obviously give a hoot about their patients and what happens to their citizens.
The problem here is that we have to get on top of this. We have to be proactive about it. We have to mandate getting it out there. Many drugs, and I could go down an extensive list of drugs right now, are in short supply and will never flag on time. Timeliness is an issue, not simply mandating reporting. The thing about timeliness is that it gives the doctor and the pharmacist the ability to find a new and alternative drug, to search around and see if they can find that drug to tide the patient over while they are trying the new drug. This is an essential component of patient care. It is important for patients. For those here who have family members who are ill, especially with chronic diseases, or family members with acute diseases who cannot find immediate care for themselves, this is a real problem.
The government should stop doing the job thing and the ideological thing and look at actual outcomes. It should look at whether the situation it has had for three years is working and move forward to have a better system to emulate the practice in the United States. It is not a bad thing to emulate good practices. The government should emulate the practice of the United States Food and Drug Administration and what Mr. Obama has done. Let us take care of Canadian patients.
This is what we intend to do. This is why this bill has come forward. This is why we, as Liberals who flagged it and came up with similar ideas in the beginning, will support the bill. It is a good bill, it is a solid bill, and it will help patients in the long run.