Funding new cancer drugs to benefit bowel cancer patients

Since I last blogged I have been involved in various meetings and phone calls about a vital subject - getting new cancer drugs to patients in England.  You may have seen a little information about this on our website: Cancer Drugs Fund announcement.

We have also been working in Scotland and Wales to support bowel cancer patients and to press for urgent reform of their approaches.  Indeed, the Scottish Government has pledged to introduce a new system designed around the principles we outlined, although I suspect the pressing matter of a referendum on independence has been occupying their mind more of late!

Beating Bowel Cancer believes that doctors should have the freedom to prescribe the drugs for bowel cancer that they believe will benefit their patients.  This principle has particularly been applied in England over the last four years under a special pot of money called the Cancer Drugs Fund.  It has resulted in thousands of patients getting treatment that would otherwise have been denied.  The benefit to patients has been immense. I believe that, with the thousands of individuals who have benefited, we now have real world data that proves the benefits of the Fund and the value to patients.

Last week there was an announcement by NHS England that there is to be extra funding (£80 million a year) for the Fund until 2016.  This is welcome news.  Alongside this it was announced that the list of drugs under the Fund would be reviewed, to check that they reflect best practice and, crucially, to ask the drug companies to submit the evidence they now have around the experience of patients prescribed over the last four years.  Beating Bowel Cancer will be working very hard to hold all parties in NHS England and the government to their promise that bowel cancer patients will get the treatment they need. We expect that bowel cancer patients will continue to benefit from the Fund.

In the longer term, we need more certainty and to put in place a permanent solution to ensure patients get the drugs their doctors says they need.  We need an approach that ensures drugs reach patients based on a "real-world assessment" of their benefit.  We have been told that this is what NHS England and the government wish to do and their intention is to involve Beating Bowel Cancer and other charities. I have recently written about this issue in Remembering the patient in the Cancer Drugs Fund debate.

In the meantime, we will go on advocating for bowel cancer patients and making the case that they need to know all the options available to them.  What matters to us is the best possible care for bowel cancer patients.