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Going to the pharmacy to get a flu shot is nothing new in Quebec but until this year nurses were giving the injections. Last year about 75% of community pharmacies offered flu shots delivered by nurses who administered approximately 350,000 doses.

New made-in-Canada test strips used to identify SARS-CoV-2 will allow rapid point-of-care RT-PCR testing in remote locations, workplace settings or pharmacies. The test strips are thermostable, meaning they don’t need refrigeration or cold-chain storage during transportation.

New technologies like continuous glucose monitoring are one way to keep diabetes patients from needing to be physically present with their physicians to manage their health, said Dr. Jeremy Gilbert, an endocrinologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.

I think about certain patients, displaced from the certainties of their lives in their home countries. They have, for complicated reasons, chosen to leave the world they grew up in to make a new life in Canada. The dominant culture here is so foreign, so strange to them. Some are ready to embrace it and go forward, and some are stuck and cannot adjust.

New options will allow specialists and family physicians in the province to offer more comprehensive virtual visits, giving them more time to take a full patient history, review test results with patients and discuss treatment options.

The typical in-person meet and greet and tour put on each year by the Kitchener-Waterloo chamber of commerce was instead held using an online platform.

A recently released report from the College of Family Physicians of Canada says the CFPC board, at its January meeting, ruled that the organization's Family Medicine Forum conference is to be "pharma free by the end of 2024." As well, the September report—"Management of Relationships with the Health Care/ Pharmaceutical Industry"—also said the board decided "that cannabis, homeopathic, and naturopathic exhibitors (will) be eliminated from the FMF exhibit hall by FMF 2021."

Dr. Samuel Hickcox, the physician lead for addictions medicine at Nova Scotia Health, said there isn't "high-quality scientific evidence" supporting such a substitution program.