Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, we’ve heard a lot about the rising cost of pharmaceuticals as being a huge cost-driver on the health system. Probably more so in other jurisdictions. It’s not as big a part of our budget proportionately, but as our population ages, we’re probably going to see more and more pressures in this area.
The provinces and territories have done a fair amount of work working together and there’s even a consortium of western provinces. One Member asked if we were part of that. In fact we are present at that table. We are working with other provinces and territories on a couple of things. There has been a lot of work on bulk purchasing of drugs. There’s been some work lead by BC and Ontario on negotiating specific prices for some very expensive drugs on a one-off basis with suppliers. There’s also some work going on looking at increased use of generic drugs to try to bring down prices. At a national level we are plugged into work that all the provinces and territories are doing.
At a more local level, we have put in our strategic plan, development of a Pharmaceutical Strategy. We have done some very early work on that. We don’t know yet what all the features of that will be. Actually, I had met with the Pharmacists Association not long ago and we’re seeking their views and have talked about renegotiating and
updating our agreement with the pharmacists. We are doing some bulk purchasing of drugs locally, as well, and some of our health authorities are involved in bulk purchasing and we’re trying to bring the other health authorities in.
This really intersects with the whole issue of drug shortages, which has been an ongoing issue in Canada, because what we’ve found is that with the recent drug shortages that got quite a bit of attention in the press, the authorities that were engaged in bulk purchase agreements actually had a guaranteed source of supply, whereas the authorities that did not have a relationship with a provider were kind of left out in the cold. We’re trying to work through our system to have all our health authorities involved in contractual arrangements which will help to some extent to moderate and mitigate the drug shortages. There’s quite a lot of work going on in that area and quite a lot of work left to do.