Sarah Boseley’s article (Cancer drug companies cut prices to win NHS approval, 18 August) is a welcome demonstration of how serious the UK pharmaceutical industry is about doing everything possible to ensure cancer patients get access to much needed medicines, yet it fails to offer a rounded perspective on affordability and drugs availability in the NHS. Our industry is acutely aware that our health service has limited money to treat millions of patients with wide-ranging medical conditions, but continuing to cut prices may not be sustainable into the future and is no silver bullet.
Our industry is playing its part. A long established deal has already seen drugs companies pay back more than £1.3bn to the government in the last 18 months to help keep NHS spending on medicines affordable. Medicines and vaccines offer some of the best – and most cost-effective – measures we have of preventing, managing and eliminating the world’s most debilitating diseases, but whether or not these successfully reach NHS patients requires fundamental changes to the way medicines are appraised, and how they eventually become adopted and used.
By over-relying on the Quality-adjusted Life Year as National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s main measure of value, many cancer medicines are disadvantaged. More flexibility, as is seen in other countries, is needed. Nice’s basic cost-effectiveness threshold for assessing value for money is also more than 15 years old and has not kept pace with either the cost of R&D or the NHS budget. With cancer medicines now more effective than ever, we are seeing scenarios where some new medicines used in combination with established treatments would, perversely, be rejected by Nice even if they were given away free due to the fact that patients are living longer.
With 7,000 new medicines in the pipeline in Europe today our industry delivers real innovation for patients. To make sure that the most effective of these are adopted and made available, companies need to offer value for money and the health system needs to ensure that assessment methods are fit for purpose. This is crucial if we are serious about delivering a world-class health service now – and into the future.
Dr Richard Torbett
Executive director, commercial, Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry
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Cancer drug appraisal needs to be reviewed | Letters
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