Patient access to medicinal cannabis here in St. Vincent and the Grenadines is something to be proud of.
This is according to Technology Specialist at the Medicinal Cannabis Authority Dr. Jean-Saville Cummings, while appearing as a guest on VC3’s Roundtable Talk.
The MCA’s Technology Specialist discussed the time it took to get the patient access regulations put together.
“Patient access really is really something, that, again, we can be very, very proud of here. I think Dr. Thompson just mentioned it and I mentioned it earlier. When we look overall at the way the Act was designed, patient access was a very prominent part of it, and it was very detailed in terms of what had to happen, what documentation was required and what the authority had to set up outside of the Act.
It actually did not take us long as I thought it would, but we spent some time getting the patient access regulations together. Those are obviously reviewed through the attorney generals chambers and eventually were gazetted. We’ve been working with doctors and pharmacists and the pharmacy council throughout this period, we tried to create a system that we think works for everybody” he said.
Dr. Jean Cummings then goes on to detail the process of a patient gaining access to medicinal cannabis.
“The patient, who has any one of these conditions can visit his doctor or her doctor upon assessing their condition and deciding that he believes, or she believes that cannabis is an effective treatment, can issue certain bits of documentation.”
The MCA’s Technology Specialist then goes on to list the required bits of documentation.
“The first is the medical certificate that again is required and doctors are quite good at preparing, they’ll also give a prescription for the formulation of cannabis that they would like to prescribe and then they would give a temporary ID card.”
Dr. Jean Cummings said patients equipped with this documentation can then go to an authorized pharmacy that stocks medicinal cannabis, present this documentation then received their prescribed cannabis.
He says that the dispenser of the medicinal cannabis then send documentation back to the Medicinal Cannabis Authority for record keeping purposes.
That was Technology Specialist at the Medicinal Cannabis Authority Dr. Jean-Saville Cummings.
According to Dr. Jean Cummings, patients looking to have their temporary ID cards converted to permanent ones will have to visit the MCA with the required documentation, where they will then obtain their permanent ID, valid for one year.
