Health committee  That's a very good question. I agree. In particular for folks who don't have easy access to subspecialists or to specialists like pediatricians, I think it can be particularly challenging to get good, high-quality information. Governments can have a role in ensuring that informa

Health committee  That's a fantastic question. I don't know that I have or that anyone has the answer to it. If I've learned anything—if we've learned anything—from the last several years of the pandemic, it's that making predictions about what's going to come next is hard to do. I agree that we

Health committee  Thank you. You're absolutely right regarding feeding. Breastfeeding does have unique benefits, but that should not mean that mothers, in particular, should face an additional burden or expectation, as they are already facing the hardest job in the world. My wife went back to wor

Health committee  In particular, with many of the pediatric medications we're talking about, we're talking about shortages of child-friendly liquid formulations. There's actually lots of Tylenol out there; it's just that it's tablets. It's hard, when you're a parent at 2 a.m., to be responsible fo

Health committee  That's an excellent question. I'm also a parent and can certainly relate to what you're talking about. I'm not an expert in formula regulation and availability. For many children who can't breastfeed, or whose parents choose not to, formula is a key form of nutrition. For some

Health committee  Yes, definitely. Medication access varies immensely between provinces and jurisdictions. This is particularly important for families living in poverty. Depending on what province you live in, you might have almost all of your children's drug costs covered, or you might have to p

Health committee  Yes. I work on an in-patient ward, predominantly. It's not an entirely infrequent situation. In hospital, all drugs are paid for by the hospital, so patients are not bearing costs. We will prescribe a medicine for when the child goes home, and then an hour or a day later, the war

Health committee  A single-payer system would certainly be the simplest way to have the federal government serve the same coordinating role as it does in other areas of health care. That would still mean that provinces have jurisdictions and are responsible for the delivery of health care, includi

Health committee  That's an excellent question. The future of pediatric drugs is going to be something we all have to grapple with. It's in the name. These are expensive drugs for rare diseases. By and large, these are drugs for a very small population. It is relatively difficult to get high-qua

Health committee  It's nusinersen, or Spinraza.

Health committee  Of course. Any profit-making company's motivation is to make profit. That's a good thing. That's how society has become wealthy and developed innovation. It's on us, as a society and as governments in particular, to balance that with appropriate regulation and controls on those

Health committee  The reality is that pediatrics, as a field, has evolved. We have largely become a specialty of rare diseases. At my hospital, I work on the in-patient ward. It's the tertiary referral centre for the province of British Columbia. A quarter to a third of all patient beds are filled

Health committee  That's an excellent question. You're right. Drug shortages actually have existed beyond this current round of, specifically, pediatric shortages. That relates to some of those regulatory issues that I talked about. There are many drugs that are not widely available in Canada, s

Health committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for giving me the honour of being able to speak to the committee. I'm Tom McLaughlin, a clinical assistant professor at the University of British Columbia and a pediatrician on the in-patient unit at BC Children's Hospital, where I take care of some of the