Beating Bowel Cancer , which is a charity which provides support for people suffering with bowel cancer, has written to Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health, warning him that patients who have terminal bowel cancer will lose their life-enhancing drugs when the Cancer Drugs Fund comes to an end in 2014. The estimate from the charity points suggests that around 6,500 patients will be affected.
The question on everyone’s lips is: what happens to those who are already on the drug when the Fund comes to an end or indeed any of the other patients currently suffering with cancer on drugs currently being funded in this way? Worrying as it sounds, will there not be a cut-off day and then everyone is left without vital medication?
A combination of the end of the Cancer Drugs Fund and NICE’s worrying decisions will be adding to what is already a huge stress of living with cancer. On 21st March 2013, NICE published a draft guidance which stated that it would not be recommending the drug Everolimus for patients who have advanced breast cancer.
Once again it seems that there are drugs which have been trialled and tested by patients but now those same patients will not have access to the medication.
NICE made this decision despite that fact that Professor Stephen Johnson from The Royal Marsden Hospital in London said in September 2012:
“The impact of the drug is so large that it is changing the natural history of the disease. Everolimus is, potentially, the most significant breakthrough for advanced breast cancer since the discovery of drugs that lower oestrogen level and has the potential to redefine the way this common form of advanced breast cancer is treated”