A few weeks to read
By some miracle, in our residency program we are given a four week block of research time. I’ve just started. Here’s my plan. Read. I plan to explore, without a concrete set of papers or…
Book: Models for Mental Disorder
Here is brief summary and review of Models for Mental Disorder by Peter Tyrer and Derek Steinberg. I read the fourth edition, but there is a fifth edition published in 2013. This is a worthwhile…
The missing orientation
Last Thursday and Friday were my first days at my new job as a resident doctor in the psychiatry post-graduate training program at Queen’s University. As you might expect, these were spent in orientation sessions….
Digital Handbooks
Handbooks are a big thing in hospitals. People dump received wisdom about locally relevant policies, procedures, diagnostic frameworks, appropriate tests or specific antibiotic use guidelines etc. into documents for other physicians to work off of….
Three commitments before residency
In a little under six weeks I’ll begin my residency at Queen’s University in Psychiatry. I’d like to take a moment now to mention some of the commitments I am making to myself for the…
Drug shortages in the time of COVID-19
According to an article by the Canadian Pharmacists Association published on April 17, 2020, Canada’s pharmacists are “concerned about dramatic increases and volatility in the number of reported drug shortages”. Specifically: The number of shortages…
How many drug shortages are there?
It was recently brought to my attention that there is a discrepancy between the number of reported shortages on the drugshortagescanada.ca website, and my own reckoning on display on the drug shortages dashboard I maintain….
A Queen’s Elective Proposal
A few months ago I was denied a reading elective. I want Queen’s Medicine to update their elective policy to allow electives like these to be possible in the future. So here’s my pitch. I’d…
Drug shortages project wrap-up
And so the two week research elective has come to an end. The last few days of the elective got jumbled a bit by some personal issues and then the frenzy of the start of…
Day 12 – what have we learned (part 2)
In the Part 1 I summarised my work to characterize the extents of drug shortages in Canada. In this part, I move on to summarising my work to look at the impact those shortages may…
Day 11 – what have we learned (part 1)
Today I’d like to take a step back and attempt to weave together some of the threads I’ve pulled on over the last few weeks, and perhaps begin to identify some larger takeaways, gaps that…
Day 9/10 – ranitidine and famotidine
I spent my day investigating two drugs. We were contacted by a CBC reporter asking about shortages of Ranitidine and Famotidine, both drugs used for reflux (why these drugs were chosen by the CBC… that’s…
Day 8 – visualising shortages, and dirty data
Today I went down a rabbit hole of trying to understand how many of the available drugs in an ATC code are impacted by shortages over time. I used the DPD to get a list…
Day 6/7 – essential medicines, again
In my last post I discussed the issue I’d found with ATC codes in the DSC database being truncated/incorrect. This meant that when I had done the essential medicines analysis my results would have been…
Day 5 – potpourri
Today I went in a mishmash of directions. Let me walk you through it. An R package for shortages I began the day a bit grumpy so decided to do some yak shaving, and as…
R package for drug shortages
2020 May Update: This package is now called rdrugshortages. Introducing drugshortagesr! An awful name for somewhat useful chunk of code to make it easier to access shortagescanada.ca shortage data. The package is currently in development,…
Day 4 – one particular drug
I didn’t mention it in my previous post, but I actually spent a long while yesterday attempting to match medicines from the proposed Canadian Essential Medicines List (EML) to the list of shortages. Initially I…
Day 3 – essential medicines
Well, day 3 has spilled over into night 3 and into day 4’s morning. It began with the question of how to assess the impact that drug shortages have on the health care system. Now,…
Day 2 – the flow of shortages
Today I focused on two things: a) starting fresh with a database export via the web API, and b) looking more closely at some basic displays that characterize shortages over time. To do all of…
Day 1 – new data, old charts
I spent the bulk of the morning setting up my development environment and refreshing myself on R and my analysis code from our paper. I then grabbed a recent export of the drug shortages database…
Revisiting Canadian Drug Shortages
I am a medical student in Canada and I am spending the next two weeks revisiting our previous work looking at the state of prescription drug shortages in Canada. I’ve already written a few introductory…
Python interface for Canadian drug shortages
I’ve built a python package for using the Drug Shortages Canada database web API. It’s called pydrugshortagesca and you can read more about it on the project github page, and install it like so: It…
Canadian Drug Shortages, redux
Okay, so my reading elective was rejected, what replaced it? Here’s the pitch: In 2018 I coauthored a paper on the drug shortages in Canada. At the time, we primarily relied on a database of…
A reading elective, denied
Here’s my pitch for a reading elective that was rejected because it does not fit the criteria of a research elective at Queen’s[1]. My academic background is in computer science with an interest in cognitive…
Episode 0, again
In this post, I’ll tell you why I’m starting up my blog, again. I’d like to tell you because I hope it will help focus my own thinking and writing in the future, it helps…