Nunavut pharmacists heap scorn on new GN plan

Nunavut health minister Tagak Curley (second from right), said March 3 in the legislature’s committee of the whole that everyone’s “happy” about a Government of Nunavut plan to reorganize pharmaceutical services in the territory. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

The Pharmacists Association of Nunavut says there’s more than just “one person” upset with a costly Government of Nunavut plan to re-organize pharamaceutical services in the territory.

Nunavut health minister Tagak Curley said March 3 in the legislature’s committee of the whole that there’s only one critic of the plan, which would farm out pharmaceutical services to Ottawa-based pharmacists and less qualified GN technicians.

“I think it was one person or the journalist in question’s opinion about what is happening,” Curley said, responding to a question about a Nunatsiaq News story that laid out details of the GN’s scheme.

In the story, Brooke Fulmer, a former director of pharmacy at the GN, said “none of the stuff makes sense,” when asked about the plan and that some of it is “just too silly to warrant a comment.”

Curley said in the legislature that he had not read the story, which was published Feb. 24 in Nunatsiaq Online.

The association, which represents pharmacists in Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay, appear united in their opposition to the plan.

In a letter, obtained by Nunatsiaq News from a third party, the association’s interim president Terry Fernandes told Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak that the plan marks a “low point in pharmacy in Nunavut.”

The letter, dated Feb. 20, condemns the GN’s plan to transfer pharmacy services in Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay to a new “supervisor of drug distribution,”as well as to less-qualified pharmacist technicians and a remote pharmacist based in Ottawa.

“As the new voice of independent pharmacists in Nunavut, we are requesting a delay in the hiring of the new Supervisor of Drug Distribution until our concerns have been heard and acted on,” the letter said.

The letter also notes the plan “makes a mockery” of the GN’s Nunavummi Nangminiqaqtunik Ikajuuti policy, designed to help Inuit-owned businesses get government contracts.

The GN’s new plan might cut Inuit-owned businesses out of a lucrative business opportunity, because the territory is contemplating its own online pharmacy, the letter said.

The plan also creates a false distinction between “clinical” and “non-clinical” pharmacists as a way of ending contracts with pharmacies in Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay.

“This would result in two pharmacies closing, since the contracts were a foundation of the pharmacy business plans under Inuit ownership, and more money would then go back to an Ottawa pharmacist for internet service,” it said.

The letter details how the GN has already moved ahead on the plan by switching its pharmacy services for the Qikiqtani General Hospital from a local drugstore to a pharmacist in Ottawa.

“The services are now provided by a pharmacist in Ottawa through a ‘Mr. Rogers’ telephone link, with no live pharmacist at the QGH monitoring drug therapy or answering questions from patients, nurses and physicians,” it said.

The cost of the remote Ottawa service is now close to $200,000 a year, the letter said.

And the letter notes how drugs supplied through the national “HealthPro” contract are now supplied directly to inmates at the Baffin Correction Centre.

But HealthPro drugs, supplied at low prices, are supposed to be used only in hospitals and nursing stations — not in jails like BCC.

This could “invalidate the HealthPro contract” and end up costing the GN much more than it’s saving now, the letter said.

As for the efficiency and speed of the new plan, which involves replacing pharmacist-handled prescriptions with tele-pharmacy, the letter says the real limiting factor in the timely delivery of prescriptions is that all prescriptions need doctors’ signatures — and this sometimes takes time.

Relying only on the internet could result in even longer delays, if repairs or service interruptions, common in Nunavut, were to occur.

And there would be “no pharmacist interaction with the patient in Inuktitut at the time of preparing a prescription.”

This could produce mistakes, the letter said.

The GN’s scheme also calls for replacing pharmacists with less qualified pharmacy technicians, who would be hired and put on the GN payroll.

Pharmacists in B.C. have consistently rejected the use of tele-pharmacy and the use of pharmacy technicians to replace pharmacists, the letter said.

The letter also slams the plan for how it proposes to handle addictive narcotics.

It also criticized a recent GN amendment to the Midwives Act that now allows midwives to prescribe all antibiotics and some other drugs.

“There was no input requested from pharmacists on the problems associated with resistance to antibiotics prescribed in large quantities for mothers and newborn children,” the letter said.