Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee. CADTH is a not-for-profit corporation funded primarily by Health Canada and all the provinces and territories, with the exception of Quebec. We are a health technology assessment agency. This me

Health committee  Madam Chair, I can probably speak to part of that question. On having one single agency to provide that oversight from a purchasing perspective, that wouldn't be CADTH. We do not have the expertise in purchasing, and a lot of that purchasing aspect is done through the group purch

Health committee  I think that's an extremely important concept. Sole-sourcing is probably one of the key factors associated with the Sandoz shortage, whether it was the provinces themselves or the group purchasing among all of the hospital groups across the country that led to it. I will refer t

Health committee  I really wouldn't have an answer to that. I'm not involved with the purchasing.

Health committee  That is a tough question to have a simple answer to. We have a complex market in Canada for pharmaceuticals, what with the provincial and federal responsibilities for regulation. The provinces and territories are responsible for the public drug plan, and there are commercial ph

Health committee  No.

Health committee  It would be very challenging for Health Canada to introduce that type of policy, which is very locally based, to determine the critical drugs that we require in our specific hospital and our specific situation. For many of the decisions it is very important to have the patient-ph

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for inviting me to appear before the committee. Let me begin by telling you a bit about the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, or CADTH. We are an independent, not-for-profit corporation that was established in 1989. We re

Health committee  Perhaps I could speak to the second question regarding accessibility and the cross-border issues in Canada. Our common drug review, for example, was a program that was set up by the provinces and territories and the drug programs within the federal government. They created it ab

Health committee  It's very different on the technology side. Drugs are so much easier because it's very top-down in most provinces. They have a drug plan and people in the ministry who do have controls in place. Devices are very bottom-up. New devices and new technologies are introduced into the

Health committee  We'll work very closely with the clerk and see what we can produce.

Health committee  Madam Chair, there are probably two things I'd like to say about that. One would be related to the common drug review again. When it was established, every province and the federal programs that deliver health care had their own systems in place. Over the 10 years or so that the

Health committee  It's probably a better question for our colleagues from Quebec. They have their own agency, Institut national d'excellence en services sociaux. It does very similar work to what we do. We do have a memorandum of understanding in place with that organization as well, so we do some

Health committee  All provinces still have their own decision-making. We're not the decision-making body. We provide the recommendations to them, but we have taken away the need for them to have this major review done.

Health committee  It's certainly something we look at when we're doing an assessment of a new technology or an existing technology, just to ensure that those human factors he talked about are actually going to make that technology useful to the system. You have hit on a significant issue, which is