TORONTO — The drug shortage gripping Canada has anesthesiologists across the country worried they won’t have enough drugs to perform surgery or the sedatives and painkillers needed to keep patients comfortable before and after their procedures.
“I’ve been getting a lot of emails from colleagues right across the country,” said Dr. Rick Chisholm, president of the Canadian Anesthesiologists’ Society.
Sandoz Canada is at the centre of an escalating drug shortage, resulting from the company cutting production of more than 100 medications after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration raised concerns about quality standards at the company’s Boucherville, Que., plant.
A fire on March 4 also affected the plant, which makes 90 per cent of injectable medications used in Canada, among them anesthetics, painkillers, cancer drugs and antibiotics.
Chisholm, an anesthesiologist at the Chalmers Regional Hospital in Fredericton, said he’s been contacted by colleagues elsewhere in Canada who say they are looking for alternatives for medications that are running short, even turning to old-style anesthetics that haven’t been used for years.
“I’ve seen planning where they’re talking about when they get down to a week of essential drugs that they have left, they’re going to have to start looking at possibly curtailing some elective surgery,” he said.
Such a cancellation occurred Tuesday when two Vancouver hospitals postponed elective heart surgeries for nine patients over fears the dwindling stock of a critical medication would leave doctors without enough to deal with emergency cardiac cases.
As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary for St. Paul’s and the Vancouver General hospitals to cancel the surgeries.