Mr. Speaker, currently Health Canada has a reporting mechanism on its website. Any doctor, health care professional, or individual citizen can report an adverse drug reaction. As I mentioned in my speech, only about 1% do get reported. Doctors are reluctant, for a whole range of reasons.
However, using the standards of practice for hospitals, Vanessa's law would insist that people working in health care institutions, clinics, and hospitals, report adverse drug reactions. It is something they are already doing in the institutions. They already have the information and they already keep it somewhere. I do not think it is particularly onerous. We would simply ask them to send the information to Health Canada so that it can look for patterns and for an early warning on drugs that may be risky or drugs that are being used in the wrong way.
Exactly how that is going to work is to be determined, but we would catch most of the serious adverse drug reactions because they are the ones that end up in hospital. If we can get the provinces to convince doctors, in some way, to start reporting out of their office on their own computers a suspected adverse drug reaction and create a really robust database from across Canada, we could even reduce more injuries and deaths.