Canada’s NDS ExperienceCanada’s NDS ExperienceOffice of Controlled Substances Office of Controlled Substances

An OverviewAn OverviewMay 8, 2007.May 8, 2007.

Organization of Health Canada

Health Canada

Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch

Drug Strategy and Controlled Substances Programme

Office of Controlled Substances

Licences and Permits Division

History of NDS use in Canada

• NDS has been in use in Canada since 1997 for the generation of import and export permits for narcotic and controlled drugs.

• Since 2003 (NDS5.1) Canada has also used NDS for the generation of licences for Class A (Group 1) precursor chemical licences, as well as import and export permits for these substances.

History of NDS use in Canada

• Because of the complexity of our licences for narcotics and controlled substances, these continue to be generated manually using a word processing software.

• The Licences and Permits Division of OCS issues approximately 5500 permits each year for the importation and exportation of controlled drugs and substances, including precursor chemicals and industrial hemp.

History of NDS use in Canada

• NDS 6.0 was installed in Canada in October 2006.

• Users were very pleased with the increased functionality. They also find the system more user friendly.

• Since the installation of NDS 6, there has been increased understanding of NDS as a whole, and a desire to ensure that data entered into the database is done so correctly.

Improvements in NDS 6

• Reporting functionality greatly improved, allowing increased generation of adhoc reports, and increased capability to do data mining of establishments or substances.

• Easy upload of estimates from the UN website.• Much more user friendly with all functionality in

one module.• Easy and fast installation.

General Requirements

• In Canada, we require additional flexibility to deal with licensed dealers. One site may have more than one licensed dealer, and one licensed dealer may have more than one licence.

• Canada is also unable to use much of the licence renewal and amendment functionality, because it does not match our current licensing process. – Renewal - In Canada, the licence number changes

upon renewal. This is not accommodated in NDS. There may also be changes to the licences, which NDS does not allow.

General Requirements

Customs Information• Additional fields are required for Customs ports.

Currently, we use the Customs port number as a primary key to facilitate possible future electronic submission of data to our Customs officers. This is not ideal. In the future, we may also want to link specific ports to specific modes of transportation.

General Technical Comments

• Technical documentation. We currently are unable to obtain adequate technical information on NDS 6, such as installation, administration or configurations documentation, ER diagrams, schema information or detail on business rules and referential integrity enforced at the application level.

• Powerbuilder source code would also facilitate the work of our IT team when supporting the users of NDS.

Design and Business Rules

• Endorsed amounts exceeding permit approved quantities cannot be handled in NDS6.

• Closing an establishment forces the user to reassign the establishment’s stock to a different establishment. This forces the user to create a dummy establishment which does not actually exist.

• Duplication of establishment information in the Establishment Master.

• Business rules not always enforced at the database level.• A trigger exists that creates a record to convert a

preparation unit of measure to a substances unit of measure in the UOM conversion table (eg. Package to kg).

Meta Data

• Marking an item inactive does not remove it from the dropdown list. This makes the dropdown lists cumbersome, and allows users to choose incorrect entries.

• Lookup tables. Currently, one can download the Pure Substances Table from the NDS website. Additional tables such as the following could also be made available:– PrepType, PrepTypeLang, – UOM, UOM Conversion table– Countries, CountryLang– Competent Authorities– CAFunctions, CAFunctionLang

Meta Data

• Greater numeric precision required. The QtyVol field needs to be increased in precision to the right of the decimal point to 9 and possibly 12 significant figures, to accommodate very small amounts of controlled substances.

• Greater specificity for Configuration Settings. Allow an application administrator to create country wide settings for validity periods for licences and permits that may vary based on substance type. Functionality should also be available to allow the period to be set in days or months.

• Additional lookup tables for provinces or states. Additional detail in this regard would allow countries to increase the specificity of the reports generated by the system. Currently this functionality only exists for countries that allow the cultivation of opium poppies.

Additional tombstone data fields

Preparation Master. Additional fields are required for the following data:– establishment code of the manufacturer, – a date field to record the date a marketed product was

discontinued from sale,– Local product code (in Canada, the DIN or NPN)– Additional fields that would allow the linking of NDS

data to other national databases.Establishment Master.– Business number of the establishment– Field available for local record file number, which may

be different from the establishment number.

Graphic User Interface

• Substance/Preparation Calculator. Only 2 significant figures are displayed in the QtyVol field. This also occurs in other popup screens.

• Dropdown lists. Currently only display four rows of data. This needs to be expanded to facilitate data entry.

• Import/Export Documents Window. After running a single query, the user cannot re-enter the DocRefNumber field again.

Migration Planning

• Columns that will be normalized, type-converted, or added to a new version of NDS should be identified to the user countries well in advance of a migration visit. This would allow countries to clean up data prior to the arrival of the migration team.

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