With nearly 1,200 Canadian cancer patients being told this month that they received watered-down chemotherapy drugs, there are now questions about who was in charge of overseeing the private company that prepared those drugs.
For more than a year, patients at four hospitals in Ontario and one in New Brunswick received cancer medication that was mistakenly diluted with saline solution by as much as 20 per cent.
All of the hospitals purchased the medications in IV bags prepared by Marchese Hospital Solutions. Marchese, which is now facing a number of lawsuits over the error, says there was a communications problem and that it was given unclear information on dosage.
According to a news report Wednesday, there is no government body that regularly inspects the work done at Marchese Hospital Solutions.
Health authorities in Ottawa told the Toronto Star that Marchese holds none of the federal licences that would trigger regular inspections and enforcement.
The Ontario College of Pharmacists, for its part, tells CTV News that the Mississauga company is not an accredited pharmacy and therefore would not be subject to reviews by its inspectors.
The Ontario Health Ministry says Marchese operates only under guidelines suggested by Cancer Care Ontario, the provincial agency that oversees cancer care in the province. But Cancer Care Ontario says it doesn’t oversee the procurement of drugs, saying that’s the responsibility of hospitals.
With questions about who was responsible for watching over a company that was providing medications that could be critical to the survival of cancer patients, Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews faced a grilling in question period Wednesday.
Ontario's New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath told the provincial legislature Wednesday that the situation is unacceptable.
“Here’s what patients in Ontario see: a for-profit company has taken over a critical part of our health-care system. People’s lives are literally in the balance. And the government doesn’t provide any oversight whatsoever,” she said.
Horwath said the premier needs to ask the province’s ombudsman to investigate why a company such as this could have been operating without oversight.
“Ontario’s ombudsman is the person who has the tools and the tenacity to look at what caused this mess. Will the premier let him do that?” Horwath asked.
Matthews dismissed the call for an ombudsman investigation and said an independent review has been called to look into the error and figure out what went wrong. She agreed that Ontario patients need assurance that such problems won’t happen again, not fighting over who should be in charge of oversight.
“Patients cannot and should not be caught in jurisdictional squabbles about who is responsible. They deserve to have confidence in our health care system,” Matthews said.
She added that she was confident that Dr. Jake Thiessen is a good choice to lead the review, which will determine how the drugs were watered down and provide recommendations to prevent future incidents.
Thiessen, the founding director of the University of Waterloo's School of Pharmacy, will be assisted by a working group that includes people from the affected hospitals, Cancer Care Ontario, Health Canada, the New Brunswick government and the Ontario College of Pharmacists.
Separate investigations by Health Canada and the Ontario College of Pharmacists are already underway.
