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Planning a pharmacare program for the Northwest Territories

University of British Columbia

The Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly in March of 1979, recommended that the Government of the Northwest Territories introduce a Pharmacare program for Senior Citizens on July 1, 1979. The Northwest Territories has a population of 46,400 people, spread through 59 settlements and over 3,379,500 square kilometers. Senior Citizens account for 2.8% of the population. The problem faced in the introduction of the program was that it also required consolidation of three existing programs. Rather than offer a universal program, the Territorial Government chose a program for those residents age 65 and over to complement the existing programs, specifically the one in the Department of Health which covers prescription drugs for twelve defined illnesses. The Government did so without introducing Pharmacare legislation but rather through a financial appropriation of the Finance Legislation. This left the final definition of policy planning and program introduction in the hands of bureaucrats. The planning of the program took place in a bureaucratic setting. The approach used was an incremental approach based on a comparison of the major features of the existing plans of British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. The detailed design involved the construction of a formulary, the quantification and numerical identification of all information in order that it could be placed in an electronic data processing format to be operated on a data base inter-active system of a Hewlett-Packard 3000 computer. The consolidated program was successfully implemented on July 1, 1979 and has worked successfully from that point. The report concludes with an evaluation of the system and how introduction of this program may be of use in the design of Pharmacare programs or other programs in other similar jurisdictions.

Text

2010-03-22

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/22273

Health Care and Epidemiology

University of British Columbia

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