From January 2002, patients in England should be able to pick up a prescription for any drug approved by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) within three months of the ruling being issued provided that their doctor recommends it, the government said last week.
The health minister Philip Hunt announced that health managers should ensure that they have budgeted for treatments in their general annual allocations that had been approved by the institute, so that all those patients who need drug treatments get prompt access to them.
"We want to ensure that patients get the appropriate drugs or treatment they need based on these recommendations," he said at the institute's annual conference in London.
The new statutory obligations to fund treatments that the institute recommends, have been broadly welcomed. But certain groups representing health managers, doctors, and drug manufacturers were concerned that no new money has been allocated to help fund expensive drugs, and other patients will suffer as a result.
"There are a number of problems with this proposal," said Nigel Edwards, acting chief executive at the NHS Confederation, which represents health authorities and trusts. "If health authorities are compelled to fund drugs that happen to have been through the NICE process, they will have to find the funds to do this from other treatments that may be much more cost effective and that benefit more patients. These powers seem inappropriate to the way the NHS is now moving and do not address the fundamental issue that there are difficult decisions to be made about priorities."
Dr Ian Bogle, chairman of the BMA, said: "The government cannot absolve itself of a responsibility to ensure that sufficient resources are made available to enable NICE guidelines to be implemented without adverse effects on other services."
Meanwhile Dr Trevor Jones, director general of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said that many of the medicines currently recommended by the institute were not being prescribed by doctors, "so the government's plan to introduce legal obligations to ensure that patients really do receive these treatments is very welcome." But he added that the lack of new funding meant that trusts would have to make economies elsewhere. "There is little point in robbing Peter to pay Paul, when patients who have other diseases and conditions are likely to suffer," he said.