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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…