Federal opioid agonist therapy policy: interrupted time series analysis of the impact of the methadone exemption removal across eight provinces in Canada.

BACKGROUND: Federal deregulation of opioid agonist therapies are an attractive policy option to improve access to opioid use disorder care and achieve widespread beneficial impacts on growing opioid-related harms. There have been few evaluations of such policy interventions and understanding effects can help policy planning across jurisdictions. METHODS: Using health administrative data from eight of ten Canadian provinces, this study evaluated the impacts of Health Canada's decision in May 2018 to rescind the requirement for Canadian health professionals to obtain an exemption from the Canadian Drugs and Substance Act to prescribe methadone for opioid use disorder. Over the study period of June 2017 to May 2019, we used descriptive statistics to capture overall trends in the number of agonist therapy prescribers across provinces and we used interrupted time series analysis to determine the effect of this decision on the trajectories of the agonist therapy prescribing workforces. RESULTS: There were important baseline differences in the numbers of agonist therapy prescribers. The province with the highest concentration of prescribers had 7.5 more prescribers per 100,000 residents compared to the province with the lowest. All provinces showed encouraging growth in the number of prescribers through the study period, though the fastest growing province grew 4.5 times more than the slowest. Interrupted time series analyses demonstrated a range of effects of the federal policy intervention on the provinces, from clearly positive changes to possibly negative effects. CONCLUSIONS: Federal drug regulation policy change interacted in complex ways with provincial health professional regulation and healthcare delivery, kaleidoscoping the effects of federal policy intervention. For Canada and other health systems such as the US, federal policy must account for significant subnational variation in OUD epidemiology and drug regulation to maximize intended beneficial effects and mitigate the risks of negative effects.

"The straw that broke the camel's back": An analysis of racialized women clinicians' experiences providing diabetes care.

INTRODUCTION: Racialized women clinicians (RWCs) experience the brunt of unfair racial and gendered expectations, which is a direct result of their visible identity. Our study sought to understand how these experiences intersect to impact the personal and professional well-being of RWCs, and their approach to diabetes care. METHODS: Data were collected from 24 RWCs working within Canadian diabetes care settings, who participated in semi-structured, one-on-one interviews conducted from April 2021 to September 2021. The data were qualitatively analyzed using thematic analysis to develop emergent themes, and interactions were explored using the socioecological model (SEM), adapted to our study context. RESULTS: We identified three themes: (1) Discordance between self-identity and relational identity impacted how RWCs interacted with others, and how others interacted with them; (2) Tokenistic, "inclusive" organizational policies/practices and inherently racist and sexist social norms permitted acts of discrimination and led to the systematic othering and exclusion of RWCs within the workplace; and (3) Differential treatment of RWCs had both positive and negative impacts on participants' relational, workplace and self-identity. Using the SEM, we also found that differential treatment of RWCs stems from upstream policies, structures, and social norms, percolating through different levels of the SEM, including work environments and communities, which eventually impacts one's relational identity, as well as one's perception of oneself. CONCLUSION: The differential treatment of RWCs arises predominantly from macro systems of the work environment. The burden to address these disparities must be shifted to the source (i.e., namely systems) by implementing interventions that equitably value diversity efforts, institute policies of accountability and correction of implicit biases, and prioritize an inclusive culture broadly across faculty and leadership.