The throne speech in September made numerous mentions of the fact that the government has stepped up and signed contracts to domestically produce personal protective equipment (to the tune of $400 million), vaccines ($1 billion) as well as ventilators. Yet, I fear that critical drugs will be forgotten in the shuffle, as the second COVID wave fills up hospitals and causes governments to push reset on their reopening plans.
Allow me to explain: there have been serious, ongoing shortages of medications needed to keep our sickest, most critically ill patients alive. Drug shortages doubled in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a survey from May of this year finding that only 3 percent of pharmacists had received their full shipments of drug orders in the first week of May. Many of these medications are used in a variety of settings – from emergency departments to operating rooms to ICUs to hospices – and are critical to the care of some of our sickest patients. These important drugs are given a Tier 3 classification by Health Canada. Their shortages cascade through the system causing a tremendous headache for front-line pharmacists, who can spend up to 25 percent of their working hours dealing with them, or for doctors, such as myself, who scramble to use alternative, often less effective agents. Drug shortages have been found to increase costs for patients, drive up the rates of medication errors, and play a role in greater patient mortality.
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