Nunavut’s tele-pharmacy scheme will “save money:” Curley

Nunavut’s health minister Tagak Curley sees a way to save money through tele-pharmacy, but the future of Kitnuna Pharmacy in Cambridge Bay is likely to be jeopardized if the Government of Nunavut decides to move ahead with its plan to use remote pharmacists located in Ottawa instead of locally-based retail pharmacists. (FILE PHOTO)

Nunavut’s health and social services minister Tagak Curley says he’s not “100-per-cent sure whether there is a new pharmacy program being proposed in our department.”

But, speaking June 8 in the Nunavut legislature, Curley said the Government of Nunavut wants “to save money,” and he suggested that a proposed internet-based pharmacy system would be a money-saver for the government.

Right now, you can only get your prescription drugs at one location, through the regional pharmacies, Curley said.

The new scheme would see drugs and prescriptions ordered “right at the nursing centre, so that they don’t have to wait two weeks to get their supply.”

“That is the purpose of the electronic tele-pharmacy service. I think it would improve it [service] and it will be cost effective,” Curley said.

However, the current pharmacy providers are outraged by the GN’s plan, which Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. has already condemned, because they say it will “undermine well-run Inuit-owned pharmacies.”

Kitnuna Corp. and Sakku Investments, which hold the contract to deliver pharmaceutical services in Rankin inlet and Cambridge Bay say “recent decisions by the GN are putting local pharmacies at risk.”

The Pharmacists Association of Nunavut has called the plan “a mockery” of the GN’s Nunavummi Nangminiqaqtunik Ikajuuti policy, designed to help Inuit-owned businesses get government contracts.

The GN’s new proposal would take the business now handled by the territory’s pharmacies of Nunavut and put it into the hands of “clinical pharmacists” who wouldn’t live in Nunavut but would be based at a “distant location” — Ottawa, according to 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, and 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, leaving Kitnuna and Sakku to wonder how the tele-pharmacy plan could end up being cheaper for the territorial government.

The GN proposal “undermines well-run Inuit-owned pharmacies in Cambridge Bay and Rankin Inlet,” say the two birthright development corporations.

If it moves ahead, they say the results will include:

• inferior and less personal service to Nunavummiut;

* longer wait times;

* closing of local pharmacies;

• “the evaporation of hundreds of thousands of dollars that Inuit organizations have invested into their local pharmacies;” and,

• “unknown costs to the GN.”

Responding to questions asked June 8 by Nattilik MLA Jeannie Ugyuk, Curley called the GN’s proposed switch to tele-pharmacy “an ongoing development and enhancement.”

“Our new director of pharmacy, who is very well qualified, has put it together,” Curley said.

Tagak said that “she [Alana Froese] has continued to discuss any arrangements with our pharmacy providers in the regions.”

“I cannot share the view that this is an all-new program; it’s just an ongoing service, and we continue to improve upon it. There are no new monies that are being requested or anything, so it’s an ongoing process,” he said.

Curley said previous questioning about in the legislature’s committee of the whole had “raised a can of worms to some members” about the planned changes.

He said his department will to develop a business case “before we ask for any expansion or any improvements.”

However, 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 at an estimated cost of $200,000 a year.