Chief executive for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Sir Andrew Dillon said that he found it highly illogical how the government-run Cancer Drugs Fund agency was paying for medication that NICE had already found to be not cost-effective. He says that it is irrational to provide funding for drugs that have already been turned down by the NICE.
Recently, NICE had faced criticism because of their reported refusal to find drugs that claimed to be able to extend the life expectancy of patients with cancer. Just last month, they turn down Kadcyla, a drug that allegedly added an average of six months to the expected survival period of women who were dying because of an aggressive form of breast cancer. Because of the refusal to find the said drug, patients had turned to the Cancer Drugs Fund to receive monetary support for purchasing the expensive drug treatment.
Dillon said that this practice is causing the misalignment of funding. "We would like to move away from a situation where we apply our correct threshold [where] we say yes to [or] we say we can't support routine use of other treatments, and in most cases the Cancer Drugs Fund then says yes to the treatments we have said no to," said Dillon as he addressed the issue to MPs on the Health Select Committee.
He added that, "I don't think that makes any sense. It's not a criticism of the decision to allocate more money to cancer. It's about an alignment of processes and methodologies that we need to get sorted out. There is no reason at all why we can't provide the basis for NHS England's on cancer treatments just as we do for all other treatments."
Dillon also warned that assigning a large portion of the money to just cancer meant that funding for other diseases would be diverted. "It's inevitable. If you choose to spend money on one thing, you can't spend it on something else. If you allocate more money to one condition, other conditions are getting less."
