By Nicole DeKort

Canada’s hospitals are under tremendous pressure. Wave after wave of COVID-19, health staffing shortages and an immense surgical and procedural backlog have dominated headlines for months. Governments and healthcare systems across the country are responding and investing in hospital infrastructure, developing significant recruitment and retention plans and rethinking the best way to cut waiting times.

Behind the scenes though, a new challenge has hit our healthcare system: a shortage of medical supplies and devices. This has caused difficulties for healthcare providers during an already highly demanding time.

Global supply chain issues have affected all sorts of devices. The COVID-19 pandemic and other global events, such as the war in Ukraine, have resulted in increases in the cost of fuel and raw materials. These and many other factors including global staffing shortages are driving up prices.

Consumers are well aware of the increases in food prices and have seen the challenges associated with buying new cars and electronics, but less noticed have been the consequences for the manufacturers and suppliers of medical devices and supplies.

According to the CD Howe Institute, prices for plastics and resin, which are critical components of broadly used medical supplies including needles and syringes have doubled, transportation costs have tripled and the prices of other raw materials such as metal have increased by more than 30 percent. The result is skyrocketing costs to produce and supply medically necessary devices ranging from IV bags and gauze, to stents, hip and knee replacements and pacemakers.

Medical supply contracts in Canada are far less flexible than their global counterparts. Manufacturers and suppliers are locked into contracts for five to seven years at fixed prices, which means, unlike in other sectors, manufacturers and suppliers are often unable to simply adjust their prices in real time to reflect the impact of these macroeconomic and geopolitical market forces.

Our industry is working hard every day to ensure that our healthcare partners have the necessary devices and supplies to continue to provide high-quality care to Canadians.

But, unless governments and purchasing organizations work with suppliers on solutions to reflect this current supply chain crisis, manufacturers and suppliers are looking at continuing to supply these devices at significant losses. This is simply unsustainable.

In March 2022, Medtech Canada released our position paper outlining four key recommendations for governments to tackle the effects of the global shipping and supply chain crisis, and its potentially detrimental impacts on patient care.

In the case of scarce supply, governments need to work with manufacturers to ensure that the Canadian health care system has access to the devices and supplies we need to support patients.

One of the latest examples of this is epidural catheters used to manage pain during labour and c-sections. Product shortages can contribute to even longer wait times – a problem when we are already dealing with record surgical backlogs – and dramatically poorer health outcomes for Canadians.

To help address supply chain challenges jurisdictions across Canada, we need to be more flexible in contracting systems for medical devices and supplies. We can and should provide greater clarity to suppliers around product need forecasting, improve contingency planning for future geopolitical events, as well as consider incentives to promote greater domestic manufacturing. However, these solutions will not be put in place overnight, and the problem is immediate and urgent.

Just as it would be beneficial to industry to have data on health system demand forecasting, we also understand that our industry needs to do its part to ensure that our healthcare and government partners are informed about foreseeable product shortages. Medical device companies provide information with Health Canada when shortages occur, and the regulator posts these shortages publicly on its website. We’ve also been engaging with government purchasing departments and group purchasing/shared service organizations to share information. We were pleased to learn at our recent annual conference that Health Canada would soon be convening a Medical Device Shortage Multi-Stakeholder Committee, which should also be beneficial to foster communication nationally and ensure efforts aren’t being duplicated.

While that work is being done to communicate about shortages, government investments are needed to help ensure that they don’t occur in the first place. Just as we have seen investments in other areas to stabilize the health system, we need investment in medical devices and supplies to help ensure that our healthcare partners can deliver the quality and timeliness of care that Canadians expect.

With the health system backlog resulting from the pandemic, Canadian patients have suffered enough from long wait times and limited access to the critical medical services they need. Medical devices and supplies are critically important to providing the quality of care we rightly expect in Canada.

We can’t ignore these supply chain issues and we urge governments to come together with the sector to ensure that our health care system not only has the capacity – but also the necessary supplies – to support Canadian patients.

Nicole DeKort is President and CEO, Medtech Canada