Quebec Pharmacists and Physicians Call for Legislative Changes to Combat Drug Shortages in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drug manufacturers in Canada should be legally required to secure several supply sources for raw materials and several manufacturing sites when seeking approval to market an essential drug — according to a joint pharmacy-medical working group in Quebec. The group also calls for legislation that would force pharmaceutical companies to give 1-year's notice before any voluntary production stoppage. The Working Committee on Drug Shortages was created by the Quebec pharmacy college — l'Ordre des pharmaciens du Quebec (OPQ) — and began its work in March 2011. Its mandate was to assess the causes of drug supply disruptions and to propose solutions that could become part of a national strategy. The committee included representatives from the Association quebecoise des pharmaciens proprietaires (AQPP) and the Association des pharmaciens des etablissements de sante du Quebec (APES), as well as from the physicians' college, the College des medecins du Quebec (CMQ). In a report released April 16, 2012, the committee outlined 9 recommendations aimed at securing the supply of pharmaceutical products. “The growing number of shortages, along with their consequences for patients, calls for an overall analysis of the cause and the implementation of concrete solutions for preventing rather than enduring supply disruptions,” OPQ president Diane Lamarre said in a news release. Drug shortages have plagued the Canadian system for at least the past 2 years, but the situation has recently worsened. In February, Sandoz Canada announced it would immediately stop production of certain drugs at its Boucherville, Quebec, plant — due to an order from US regulators to improve quality-control processes. Sandoz is the sole supplier to Canadian hospitals of 90% of all injectable drugs. Mandating a 1-year notice period “is crucial so that we can come up with viable alternative solutions, whether finding new supply sources or identifying substitute medications, for example,” said Charles Fortier, president of the APES.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.003 |
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".