This post is a part of a series on drug shortages.
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 self-reported shortages but we had incorporated a few months of data from a then-new shortage database to which the Canadian government has made reporting mandatory. The objectives of my research elective would be to:
- Collect data from the new mandatory drug shortage database (we would have nearly 2 years of additional data)
- Re-do our analysis with the combined data to see what, if anything, has changed since in the last two years now that we have reliable data.
- Draft a short manuscript with our latest findings to be published. This could also take the form of a “dashboard” like website that has constantly updated figures and statistics.
The source code for the analysis in our paper is available here: https://github.com/pipitone/drug-shortages. I will very likely post updates to that repository once I get started on working in the new year.
In other news, we have started a list for those interested in discussing the current issue of drug shortages in Canada. Join here: https://groups.io/g/canadadrugshortage.
