Not Nice

Matching up expensive drug treatments with limited funds is not easy. Today Anna Wolfenden published her open letter to the Assembly Government health minister about a cancer drug that is not yet available on the NHS. She is not the first to complain about the decisions of NICE, the body with the difficult task of deciding which treatments can be funded.

During debates of this sort you can always rely on someone to invoke the ghost of Aneurin Bevan by mentioning the 'principles of the NHS' (namely that treatment is free at the point of need). But health expenditure is going to simply carry on rising all the time - and faster than our ability to pay.

Are these 'principles of the NHS' really fit for twenty-first century healthcare purposes? Surely equitable health outcomes for all might be a better principle to aspire to rather than holding fast to a mechanism for delivery that was not planned with these expensive drugs in mind. Anyway, in England (and for the moment in Scotland) you have to pay for your prescriptions, so treatment is already not free at the point of need across the NHS.