Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In a follow-up to questions on my Member’s statement earlier on prescription drugs and the misuse and possibly the over-prescribing of, more specifically, pain killers, I would like to ask the Minister of Health and Social Services, what is the Minister doing to address the over-prescribing of pain killers and the misuse of prescribed drugs? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Minister of Health, Mr. Abernethy.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m glad the Member asked the question. Contrary to what has been suggested previously in the House, I as a Member, I as the Minister and the department both take this issue incredibly seriously. Within the department of Health and Social Services, our chief clinical advisor is actively involved in putting together a working group and committee, formed consisting of physicians and other health care practitioners, pharmacists and government personnel, to discuss and come up with solutions around the prescription drug abuse issue. Also, the department is working to set standards that will help guide physicians and nurse practitioners on prescribing opiates and other medications, but it’s not just within the department. The medical directors of the Northwest Territories forum is working on guidelines for controlled substances, and these would be territory-wide and include an educational component as well. These guidelines and standards are also going to include some work around the management of opiate dependence as well.
Once again, it’s not just the department and the medical directors. Under the Health Information Act we have the ability under Section 65 to actually put in a monitoring program, which will help provide information and the resources. We need to figure out what is happening with respect to prescription drug abuse.
Lastly, the federal government recently put money into their federal budget to address this issue because it is such a significant issue and the Ministers of Health across the country are working together to look for ways to address prescription drug abuse. So, a large number of things are happening, and we take this very seriously, and we are working to find solutions and provide tools that will help practitioners as well. Thank you.
Thank you. That was a really good update. I thank the Minister for all the information that he provided. He did mention that under Section 65 of the Health Information Act, which is slowly coming out and developing that monitoring program, I’m assuming that we can’t get that monitoring program until the Health Information Act comes into play here.
Is there anything that we can do to monitor any prescription or prescription drugs in the meantime until the Health Information Act gets ascent? Thank you.
Thank you. In the winter session there was some debate back and forth between myself and MLA Dolynny from Range Lake about our ability to monitor, and the Member did identify a large number of pieces of legislation and indicated that we can do a monitoring program. I was listening very closely to what the Member was saying and I asked the department for a comprehensive legal opinion on whether or not we could, and the department and the lawyers pointed out that we can’t take individual pieces of legislation and think about them independently. We have to look at how they crosslink. The bottom line is we’re still not able to put in the monitoring program. There are some barriers. We will be able to do it with the Health Information Act.
However, it was also suggested to me that with a minor tweak to the Pharmacy Act to include a notwithstanding clause related to the ATIPP, we would actually be able to put in a monitoring program. This is an important issue. I know Mr. Dolynny has raised it; I know Mr. Moses has raised it. We need to move forward on this. So I have come forward with an LP and I have provided to committee that it will allow us to make a minor change to the Pharmacy Act, which will allow us to put in the monitoring program that both Mr. Dolynny and Mr. Moses would like to see in place. Thank you.
Thank you. I think there are a lot of people in the Northwest Territories, especially the families, as well, would like to see that monitoring program in place to help those that are battling addictions of these pain killers and affecting their lives.
The Minister also mentioned a working group. Can we get a timeline as to when that working group will first be meeting and when they’ll get together to start looking at possibly developing a strategy and looking at areas to develop these guidelines on the monitoring and the tracking of these prescription drugs and looking at some of this legislation? Thank you.
Thank you. I did mention that there are a number of things going on, and there’s work at the federal level, but I’m happy to keep the committee updated on that as we move forward. There’s also the work of the Medical Directors’ Forum and I’m happy, as I get briefings, to provide that information to the committee, as well, but we also have the departmental group that is being led by our chief clinical advisor and that group actually has been convened. Their scheduled first meeting was for May. I will follow up to find out what the results of that meeting were, but there’s so much good work out there being done. As the Member mentioned in his Member’s statement, a number of reports have been done and one of the reports that was done was “First Do No Harm,” which was put together by the federal government, Nova Scotia and Alberta, and that report has been shared with all these different groups so that they can take best practices and lessons learned as they move forward to come up with some solutions. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think one of the main things is with the data collection monitoring, with the monitoring system, what kind of data collection will we have on file and how will that be used to develop future strategic plans, and will there be a data component in place and will it include not only drug misuse and over-prescribing but also stats that are related to overdose of prescription drugs? Thank you.
Thank you. Through the Pharmacy Act, with the amendment to the Pharmacy Act we’ll be able to track what has been dispensed. The interpretation of that data will have to be done and we’ll have to come up with some policies to figure out how to do the interpretation of that data so that we can try to understand where the abuses are occurring. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The Member for Deh Cho, Mr. Nadli.
