Winter 2010

Ontario Citizens’ Council – Charting Ontario’s Drug Policy

Setting and updating drug policy is a major challenge for governments in Canada and abroad. Several HPME faculty members have extensive scholarly and decision-making experience in this complex area, and the Government of Ontario recently called on their expertise to help forge a new initiative aimed at informing drug policy-making for the province.

Three HPME professors – Tony Culyer, Andreas Laupacis, and Douglas Martin – took part in a panel that counselled on the shape and direction of the new Ontario Citizens’ Council. This body comprises 25 women and men who are representative of Ontario’s population. The Council’s members will offer advice to the Executive Officer of Ontario’s Public Drug Programs and the Minister of Health and Long-Term Care on important matters of value judgement bearing on Ontario’s public drug programs.

“This innovative advisory group is unique in Canada,” says Culyer, “and there is only a small handful of others in the world.” Overseas examples include the Citizens’ Council in the United Kingdom, which Culyer, in his role as the founding vice-chair of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in England and Wales, also helped to create.

In its first meeting (29-31 January 2010), the Ontario Citizens’ Council addressed the situations and conditions that would merit provincial government coverage of drugs used to treat “rare diseases.” This is an acutely important topic to consider, particularly because, Culyer points out, “the cost of those medicines is steep and their effectiveness is highly uncertain.”