If your wellness is damaged by terminal cancer, you could spend your dying days tangled in bureaucratic tape, trying to get the treatments you need. This is according to charities who say that a governmental decision to drastically scale back treatments for the terminally ill has betrayed cancer patients’ wellbeing.
As it stands, if you suffer from over 120 types of cancer, you can access funding for up to 46 drugs which are not routinely supported by national NHS rationing bodies. This is following an election manifesto pledge by David Cameron that no cancer patient should be denied treatment if their specialist sought it, and so, under a £200million drugs fund, you could receive the drugs for such life-threatening diseases as leukaemia, lung and ovarian cancer.
However, last week NHS officials drew up a new streamlined central list that will slash this availability by about half, only supporting the funding for just 28 drugs which are used to treat around 65 types of cancer. According to Andrew Wilson, chief executive of the Rarer Cancers Foundation, ‘This is a complete and utter backwards step, and it entirely breaks the spirit of what was pledged – which was that decisions about prescribing should be made by clinicians for the benefit of their patient. This creates a whole new tier of rationing, which is prejudicial to those with rare cancers, and it is a betrayal of the promises which were made.’
Before the last General Election, David Cameron pledged, ‘Patients in this country should be among the first in the world to use effective cancer treatments, but are being denied access to drugs widely available in Europe. We want to get more drugs to people more quickly and in the UK today there are some people – thousands of people – who want a certain cancer drug, whose doctors tell them they should have a certain cancer drug, who don’t get it.’
Doctors have been able to make requests to access the cancer drugs fund via health authorities since September 2010, but now these organisations have been abolished and on Thursday Sir David Nicholson led a new central body, NHS England, in issuing a central list of recommended drugs, which excludes at least 18 treatments which had previously been funded.
Gus Baldwin, Head of Public Affairs at Macmillan Cancer Support, said, ‘The fund has helped tens of thousands of cancer patients access the life-prolonging drugs they need giving them precious time with their families and friends. The Government must clarify as soon as possible how drugs which have been paid for by the fund will be available beyond 2014 so cancer patients can continue to access the drugs they need without the stress and worry that this uncertainty brings.’
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