Finding Solutions: Louise Binder on faster access to new medicines

On this episode of Finding Solutions, Dan continues the healthcare solutions series with Louise Binder, one of Canada’s most experienced patient advocates. Louise traces her path from HIV advocacy in the early 1990s, when the system moved too slowly to save lives, through co-founding the Canadian Treatment Action Council, to her current work as a health policy consultant with Save Your Skin Foundation, including travel and accommodation support so patients can reach treatments and trials they cannot get at home.

They walk through Canada’s drug access maze from a patient’s point of view: Health Canada safety and efficacy review, health technology assessment, Pan-Canadian Pharmaceutical Alliance price negotiation, and separate provincial formulary decisions, often run consecutively rather than at the same time. Louise argues that delay is not abstract. For cancer, each month without treatment can cut survival chances sharply, yet the full path from a drug entering Canada to first provincial reimbursement can stretch past two years. She also describes the “postal code lottery”: rural and remote patients shut out of urban-centred trials, and neighbours in different provinces facing different reimbursement outcomes for the same drug, which she says runs against the spirit of the Canada Health Act.

The conversation turns to solutions Louise sees as practical, not impossible: concurrent rather than consecutive review; less siloed provincial drug, hospital, and physician budgeting; risk-sharing agreements and real-world evidence for innovative therapies; hub-and-spoke clinical trials and subcutaneous options that reduce travel; stronger funding and a real seat for patient organizations at every decision table; and support for changes so clinicians can access a patient’s full health information across the country. She welcomes much of the federal pharmaceutical and life sciences sector task force roadmap, especially overhauling drug review and modernizing clinical trials and research, while stressing that provinces must come on board and that money without accountability will not fix the problem.

To learn more about Louise and the organizations she works with:

- Save Your Skin Foundation: https://www.saveyourskin.ca/ - Team / Louise Binder bio: https://www.saveyourskin.ca/ourteam- Canadian Cancer Society: https://cancer.ca/ - BioCanRx (Canada’s immunotherapy network): BioCanRx | Canada’s Immunotherapy Network | Cancer Clinical Trials- Bill S-5, *Connected Care for Canadians Act* (Parliament of Canada): https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/45-1/s-5