Health committee  Madam Chair, I can respond to that question, and thank you very much for it. I am not certain of the member's concern with respect to the lack of reporting. We have been reporting, on an annual basis, our activities, and we could provide further information to the chair for you

Health committee  Madam Chair, I can respond to Dr. Bennett's question with respect to the aboriginal health human resources initiative and the $100 million that was agreed to by Parliament for this initiative. This initiative was intended to achieve four specific targets: doubling the number of

Health committee  You'd have to ask them.

Health committee  The issue you're asking about is whether or not there is therapeutic substitution available. We follow what provincial governments have enacted in their laws and regulations with respect to classes of medication that fit the same treatment profile. So they deal with the same diag

Health committee  No, the rationale is to provide effective care. The example perhaps you're looking at is our policy with respect to proton pump inhibitors, and when we introduced that, we looked carefully at the literature. We saw that based on the studies within that class of proton pump inhibi

Health committee  We try to pursue this on an efficiency basis. Our mandate is to use the resources that Parliament votes to us in the most efficient way we have, without compromising the therapeutic programs. We work with physicians and pharmacists to ensure that the program is therapeutically so

Health committee  We've seen improvement in the quality of work that's been done since the common drug review, and we've seen efficiencies in having one expert panel deal with it. We've reduced the amount of work we do on reviews of new drugs. We have seen the time period go down between when a dr

Health committee  We do not reassess the work that the common drug review has done. What we do look at is certain decisions they make based on parameters that they set out quite clearly. Some of them are things like the cost of the drug. Some of them are looking at alternatives. For example, I ta

Health committee  I think that if they conclude their reviews in a shorter period, the total time between the drug's coming on the market and the drug's being listed in our program would be reduced. As I said, we are trying to reduce the amount of time that we spend looking at our particular popu

Health committee  I am not sure if I understood the difference between my position and Ms. Bruce's position. I think we're saying there is a period of time that the CDR does work and there's a period of time afterwards that each department looks at it and their drug plans to see if it's appropriat

Health committee  We've been seeing the advantage of a national or common core formulary, but as mentioned previously, there are very particular needs of different plans, and those needs show up in the formulary. And I think that was a strength of the system, not a weakness.

Health committee  For first nations and Inuit health non-insured benefits, there are two drugs that were not recommended. One is Lantus, which is a long-acting insulin drug that is on our exceptions list. It's been put there because it is sometimes useful instead of having to go to an insulin pump

Health committee  I don't have the precise numbers. We could work to see if we could get an estimate. I think it may be difficult to go back in time and find out exactly what has happened, because it was part of some person's job and now they've moved. As I said, they're spending more time on safe

Health committee  Excuse me, I didn't get that. Where in the estimates—?

Health committee  We're satisfied with the decisions of the CDR. As I said, in two cases where they had turned down a drug, we thought there was a reason that our particular clientele would benefit and that we would have a cost-effective situation where maybe generally it wouldn't exist.