As we blogged earlier this week – and most people will have seen in the media – Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has announced that the future role for NICE will not be to make decisions on the cost-effectiveness of new treatments and issue guidance on recommended NHS prescribing. This role will fall to GP consortia as part of the government’s wider public sector reforms, and follow negotiations made between the government and pharmaceutical companies on ‘value based pricing’ for new treatments. Earlier this week, we were able to find out a little more about the potential role for NICE in the future as Chief Executive Andrew Dillon spoke at the annual Wellards healthcare policy conference.
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Posts Tagged ‘NICE’
Andrew Dillon speaks on the future for NICE
Monday, November 8th, 2010How will the NICE reforms affect patients and priorities for healthcare communications?
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010This week Health Secretary Andrew Lansley announced that NICE will be stripped of its power to ‘ban’ drugs on the NHS that it does not recommend as cost-effective. Instead, from 2014, GP consortia will be responsible for these decisions. News headlines about patients being denied access to a life-saving or life-extending drug are common, but the announcement does not necessarily mean that patients will now receive greater access to drugs, despite the inevitable pro-patient rhetoric the government has used. ‘Wonder drugs’, or any other kind of drugs for that matter, must continue to show value and healthcare communications will play a vital role here, both as part of negotiations with the government on its value-based pricing scheme, and throughout the longer term dialogue with GP consortia. In short, the issue of value and controversy over drug pricing and access won’t go away by changing the way NICE works, and it could even make things more complicated.
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Could doctors looking at your Facebook improve treatment?
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010Are healthcare professionals looking at your Facebook page? The most likely answer is ‘no’, since GPs, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare professionals (HCPs) are busy enough as it is without wanting to look up their patients on the internet. However, doctors in the UK are now being encouraged by NICE to ask patients probing questions about how much they drink. If doctors are rewarded for meeting targets, what is to stop them from looking at Facebook or running Google searches for patients they are most concerned about?
How does pharma respond to supermarket cancer drugs?
Monday, May 24th, 2010Last week ASDA announced that its in-store pharmacies will sell cancer drugs, such as Sutent, Iressa and Nexavar, at a heavily discounted not-for-profit price. Several other supermarkets followed suit. Strangely, this means ASDA and others are in ‘competition’ with the NHS, or at least opposed to the workings of the NHS. This obviously has implications for the pharma industry. A logical assumption is that if patients begin to pay for their own treatment, they will have questions about the cost of the drugs, rather than the NHS footing the bill. Yet how can pharma respond to patients’ concerns given the ban on directly communicating to them about drugs at risk of being promotional?
Are anti-pharma attitudes affecting UK clinical trial development?
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010Recent data published in the Financial Times has highlighted a significant decline in the number of clinical trials conducted in the UK. According to Department of Health figures, the number of UK trials has fallen by 258 in the past year alone (728 in 2008 to 470 in 2009). The FT put this down to bureaucracy, low recruitment rates and the slow uptake of new drugs in the UK. But could anti-pharma attitudes also be playing a role in the fall in rates?
Is NICE beating pharma in the drugs pricing war?
Thursday, December 24th, 2009By reading the headline earlier this week in The Independent you would think so… The story was all around pharma lowering their price for the soft tissue sarcoma drug trabectedin. However, the revelation was that it was the third time in the past year that companies have lowered the price of cancer drugs to receive NICE approval. So is this an example of a wider ‘drugs pricing war’?
Innovative drugs to bypass NICE approval
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Plans for a three-year ‘Innovation Pass’ which would increase patient access to innovative drugs through by-passing NICE are progressing well. The consultation process is now open, and closes on 8 February 2010. If you represent the pharma industry, the NHS, patient groups, or a similar stakeholder, you might want to feed into this, especially since it could all effect us one way or another when the scheme launches. But what could it look like when the process is complete?
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