NTI condemns GN tele-pharmacy plan

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. wants the Government of Nunavut to back away from its plan to take over the delivery of pharmacy services and not endanger the future of the territory’s Inuit-owned pharmacies, like Kitnuna’s pharmacy, whose pharmacist Brooke Fulmer is shown here. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. wants the Government of Nunavut to back away from its plan to take over the delivery of pharmacy services.

NTI says this scheme would lead to the closure of pharmacies in Cambridge Bay and Rankin Inlet and that it violates the spirit of Nunavummi Nangminiqaqtunik Ikajuuti, the policy based on the Nunavut land claims agreement’s Article 24, as well as the mandate of the GN’s Tamapta document, and the protocol that governs working relations between the GN and NTI.

The GN’s health and social services department should continue to use Sakku Drugs in Rankin Inlet and the Kitnuna Pharmacy in Cambridge Bay “for its overall pharmaceutical requirements,” says an April 4 motion, which received unanimous support from all NTI board members who met last weekend in Iqaluit.

Sakku Drugs and Kitnuna Pharmacy, run by the birthright corporations in the Kivalliq and Kitimeot regions, “serve as proud example of how Inuit can work co-operatively with government and build the local economy and infrastructure,” the motion said.

The GN’s health department’s new plan would see all Nunavut health centre or hospital prescriptions handled remotely by pharmacists in Ottawa.

A less-qualified pharmaceutical technician within a local health centre would consult by telephone or use the territory’s new e-health telecommunications network with a team based at the Ottawa General Hospital.

“The Sakku Drugs and Kitnuna Pharmacy are Inuit-owned companies that provide local and regional benefits including improved personal pharmaceutical distribution, employment and profits for Inuit birthright corporations,” the NTI motion says.

The GN’s new plan would use “clinical pharmacists” who wouldn’t live in Nunavut but would be based at a “distant location” — Ottawa, says a GN document obtained earlier this year by Nunatsiaq News.

The plan would also use:

• an Iqaluit-based “territorial drug distribution supervisor;”

• three “pharmacy technicians” in Iqaluit;

• one pharmacy technician each in Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay.

All these workers would be linked “visually using tele-pharmacy equipment to communicate, support each other and check each other’s work.”

Their salaries would all be picked up by the GN.

NTI’s motion says tele-pharmacy would offer “an inferior pharmaceutical service, that may result in the closure of Sakku Drugs and Kitnuna Pharmacy and loss of benefits to Inuit.”

Nunavut pharmacists have also condemned the plan to put less-qualified or remote pharmacists in charge of pharmacy services.

The Nunavut Pharmacists Association told Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak earlier this year that the plan marks a “low point in pharmacy in Nunavut.”

The GN’s plan also runs against what other jurisdictions in Canada are trying to do, that is, to bolster their community pharmacists’ responsibility and keep their local pharmacies open, according to the executive director of the Ottawa-based Canadian Pharmacists Association.

In an April 8 interview Peter Ma, deputy minister of the health and social services department, said he was not yet ready to comment on the tele-pharmacy plan, but expected that he would speak to it before the next sitting of Nunavut’s legislative assembly, which starts May 31.