Health committee  Thank you for the question. Certainly we see variations, but it's just a reflection of provincial governments passing legislation. The nature of legislation and the stage the province is at in terms of developing primary health care vary from province to province. I think that'

Health committee  One of the critical things is that, as I mentioned, we provide this digital service e-Therapeutics+, and we post every Health Canada advisory that becomes available, alerting physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and other prescribers to any new adverse drug reaction that's out there.

Health committee  E-prescribing has a lot of potential to actually improve the safety of drug use if it's done properly. However, as you're perhaps aware, there are some studies of e-prescribing where in fact it has created more errors than it has solved. It has to be done carefully. It has to be

Health committee  Could I just add something? One of the practical things that our members deal with on a regular basis is the young child who comes into the pharmacy with either their grandparent or perhaps an aging parent and essentially acts as the go-between in terms of translation. I think it

Health committee  As a specific activity, we've been working with Canada Health Infoway. As a national association, our big commitment is to the development of national standards to actually make sure that, rather than having to sort of reinvent the wheel in terms of the electronic health record

Health committee  Thanks. I think that's an important question. The critical thing that we've seen happen to date, I think, is that nearly every country that has taken an expensive top-down approach to try to develop electronic health records has struggled to actually achieve that. If you look at

Health committee  Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you to the committee for the invitation to present today. My name is Jeff Poston, and I'm the executive director of the Canadian Pharmacists Association. With me is Dr. Phil Emberley, CPhA's director of pharmacy innovation. We are the national

Finance committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. The Canadian Pharmacists Association is very grateful for this opportunity to appear before the committee. For those of you who are not familiar with the organization, CPhA, as we refer to it, is the national organization that represents indivi

Health committee  Yes, if I could just add to that, I think we've seen some good examples recently, one, for example, from the United Kingdom, where the government is actually funding--and Scotland has been the key piece--minor ailment schemes for community pharmacies. Patients register with a pha

Health committee  I think there probably is. I would suggest.... I think the word that's emerging is inter-professional; it's either collaborative practice or inter-professional practice. I think that's where the literature and the serious thinking around this are heading.

Health committee  I think the important thing is the inter-professional piece, which is the bit that that we want to try to get at.

Health committee  I actually think that provinces are beginning to take some action. We've seen dramatic change around scopes of practice for pharmacists, with legislation to give pharmacists prescribing authority in a number of province. There have been quite dramatic things, but the issue is tha

Health committee  The issue of health care reform, and particularly reform relating to primary care, is high on the agenda for many provinces, and particularly the development of inter-professional practice as well. We appended to our submission the results of a large national study we had done in

Health committee  Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I'm the executive director of the Canadian Pharmacists Association. We are the national voluntary professional association representing Canadian pharmacists. Our members practise in the community, in ho

Health committee  I would add that I think that's a symptom of the overall underinvestment that's taking place in this country, in terms of educating and training health care professionals. Because you have such an endemic shortage across the board, you have this sort of movement that creates majo