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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18813

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Briggs H
NICE to lose powers to decide on new drugs
BBC News 2010 Nov 1
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11664684


Full text:

The medicines watchdog, NICE, is to lose its power to turn down new medicines for use on the NHS.

It will give advice on which drugs are effective, but will not decide whether patients should be given treatments their doctor recommends, the Department of Health has confirmed.

Instead, groups of GPs will decide whether a drug should be funded or not.

Ministers hope to make new drugs affordable to the NHS by negotiating with pharmaceutical companies on price.

The plans, called value-based pricing, are set to come into effect in 2014. They are subject to consultation.

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A Department of Health spokesperson said: “We will introduce a new system of value-based pricing which will make effective treatments affordable to the NHS.

“Our plans will ensure licensed and effective drugs are available to NHS clinicians and patients.

“We will focus NICE’s role on what matters most – advising clinicians on effective treatments and quality standards – rather than making decisions on whether patients should access drugs that their doctors want to prescribe.”

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence’s (NICE’s ) guidance on recommended drugs applies to England and Wales, and also usually Northern Ireland.

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NICE has too often misread the public mood in rejecting clinically effective drugs for rare cancers”

Mike Hobday
Macmillan Cancer Support
Andrew Dillon, chief executive of NICE, said: “We support moves to extend access to new treatments at prices which reflect the additional value to patients.

NICE is the global leader in evaluating the benefits of new drugs and we anticipate being at the heart of the new arrangements.”

The cancer charity, Macmillan Cancer Support, said NICE had performed an important role for the NHS but had “misread” the public mood.

Mike Hobday, Head of Policy, said: “Having a body that can say ‘no’ to pharmaceutical companies has been crucial in driving the price of drugs down, so that the NHS can afford to support patients more often.

“But NICE has too often misread the public mood in rejecting clinically effective drugs for rare cancers.

“It has placed insufficient weight on the importance of allowing the NHS to give patients with rare cancers the drugs that their doctors believe will extend or improve the quality of their lives.”

He said the charity was talking to the government to ensure that the NHS would be able to provide all cancer patients with clinically effective drugs recommended by their doctors.

Health think tank, The King’s Fund, said NICE had made “significant progress” in providing an evidence-based approach to decisions on the cost effectiveness of drugs.

This had helped the NHS get more value from the way it spends its money, although it had not eliminated local variation, said chief economist Professor John Appleby.

He added: “With the NHS budget under huge pressure, it will be essential that the new arrangements work to generate more benefit from what already amounts to well over £10 billion spending on drugs each year.”

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909