Health committee  Thank you for inviting HealthPRO Procurement Services to present at today's meeting. My name is Kathy Boyle, vice-president of pharmacy services at HealthPRO. I would like to introduce my colleague, Michael Blanchard, clinical director at HealthPRO. HealthPRO is Canada's nationa

Health committee  Yes. Part of our new strategy—and we are putting this strategy in place in the contracts we are going to award in September 2012—is to take a multi-supplier award and not a single-supplier award for what we call hospital-specific items, which are primarily injectable products us

Health committee  I haven't actually seen the new version of the website, if there was a version just launched. We do know the principles under which the intention to form the website was founded, and we in fact put in a proposal to offer to provide the website for people because of our many yea

Health committee  Within our contracting process we follow the rules of agreement on internal trade. We follow any provincial rules that govern competitive bidding. Certainly, in the past, I think it was quoted by the minister in B.C. that pricing has been a very big part of the focus of going to

Health committee  Within our contracting process on backup supply, a supplier who is under contract, who is committed to supply, is responsible for any differential in cost that a participating hospital might incur if that supplier cannot provide a product. If it comes to a single-source supplier,

Health committee  The control we have is that going forward we will be awarding to more than one supplier where there is more than one supplier available in the market. Further than that, I believe it's the role of government if there needs to be regulation to control the exiting of suppliers from

Health committee  We haven't been speaking to MPs, but we have certainly been talking to our professional associations about drug shortages since 2002.

Health committee  I would like to make a comment. If we're talking about risk assessment, I don't think we should be looking at procurement strategies to be the one solution for risk assessment. If you start to introduce a variety of products into hospitals that have very specialized health care d

Health committee  We receive competitive bids on genericized products only. Although we contract for patented products, we don't have an opportunity to find alternate sourcing when the product is still under patent protection. What we will be doing in the future is looking at where a product has c