Still some short-term pain for New Brunswick pharmacists but NBPA sees encouraging signs from the province
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pharmacists in New Brunswick continue to feel economic pressures due to the province’s drug policies but there are signs the government is willing to address at least some of pharmacy’s concerns in the future. “We are still struggling immensely with the short-term impact of the policies,” says Paul Blanchard, executive director of the New Brunswick Pharmacists’ Association (NBPA). “But we think we are building a process and a framework for the longer term.” Like all provinces, New Brunswick has taken steps to curtail drug expenditures through price reductions on generics. Through a series of reductions that began in June of 2012, generic drug prices in the province have dropped from 50% to 70% of brand-name prices to 25%, and in some cases, 18%. According to Mr. Blanchard, little has been done to help pharmacy adjust to the steep declines in revenue. “Many of the provinces have implemented change in a more measured way but we’ve had 4 cuts in a 12-month period with minimal reinvestment,” he says. “A year ago we had a $1 fee increase but that pales in comparison to some of the transitional supports provided to pharmacists in other provinces.” The province is achieving more drug savings than originally budgeted and yet the pace of reinvestment in pharmacy services has been “alarmingly slow,” Mr. Blanchard says. The association was also frustrated by many of the regulatory amendments the province proposed in May 2013, including reductions to dispensing fees for methadone and for more expensive brand-name drugs. For example, explains the executive director, a drug costing $1500 currently has a fee of $63 but the proposed regulations propose would lower that fee to $10.50. “We’ve never had any discussion or consultation about brand pricing; yet, here we have the government suddenly regulating changes in this area,” he adds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.066 | 0.009 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".