Ministerial Statement
Honourable Joan Marie Aylward
Minister of Health and Community Services
November 30, 1999

I am pleased to announce today the development of a Prescription Drug Monitoring Pilot Program which will help us to identify and address prescription drug abuse and misuse in our province.

This new program is the result of a collaboration of government, physicians, pharmacists and other related health care professionals. Government has committed $600,000 over the next two years for this pilot project.

Despite efforts to contain the abuse and misuse of prescription drugs almost all sectors of society are now affected in some way as health care and regulatory officials try to contain the problem.

Medications are accessed both through legal and illegal means. For example, medications have been accessed through:

• break and entry or armed robbery

• fraudulent prescriptions

• multiple doctoring, and

• excessive or inappropriate prescribing by physicians

Medication abuse and misuse is of great concern, not only because health care costs increase, but of far greater consequence is the number of people whose lives are negatively impacted from such abuse. Prescription drug abuse and misuse can have a significant impact on many areas of daily living including parenting ability, school attendance/performance, employee attendance/performance, domestic relationships, and a person's overall health status.

The new Program will provide a means of monitoring the purchases of certain classes of medications with a potential for abuse and misuse. The program will be operated by the Newfoundland Medical Board (NMB) along with an advisory board consisting of other health care professionals. The NMB will have the authority to act on the resulting information and/or inform the appropriate parties when a situation is identified.

I would like to emphasize that this program will be operated by health care professionals who are already very familiar with the importance of patient confidentiality -- a number of safeguards have been put in place. Only the NMB will have access to patient identifying information. The Advisory Board, while not privy to this information will advise the NMB of the types of circumstances which may require follow-up by other organizations such as the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary.

This monitoring initiative will help us to identify and address areas of concern - be it individual patients in need of treatment services or the need to educate health care professionals in areas of appropriate drug use and the identification of signs of abuse and misuse.

Legitimate use of prescription drugs will not be affected. What we will be targeting is the abuse and misuse which results when medications are used inappropriately, either not for the intended purpose or for longer periods or at higher doses than recommended.

Government is pleased to be able to collaborate with our partners on this initiative. Working together with them and our advisory board, I am certain that we can help address these issues, for the betterment of the health and safety of the residents of Newfoundland and Labrador.