DoH urged to enforce ruling on cancer drug
Postcode prescribing is still prevalent in the UK, according to a leading cancer charity. CancerBACUP has criticised NHS drug provision following a survey by pharmaceutical company Roche that claims only a third of British women who are eligible for its breast cancer drug Herceptin are receiving it.
The National Institute of Clinical Excellence decided in March last year that Herceptin should be made available on the NHS to all patients who needed it, at an average cost of £13,000 per patient.
But CancerBACUP claims that many patients are still not being offered the drug by their consultants. The Roche survey found that there were huge discrepancies in the availability of Herceptin, with nearly two thirds of eligible patients in the South East being treated with the drug, while just 14% were receiving it in the Midlands.
Herceptin prolongs the lives – and increases the quality of life – of patients with advanced forms of breast cancer. It is targeted at women with metastatic breast cancer whose tumours over-express the HER2 protein, encouraging aggressive cancer growth.
HER2 over-expression occurs in around a quarter of breast cancer patients, leaving them with half the life expectancy of women with other forms of the disease.
Joanne Rule, the chief executive of CancerBACUP claimed that that NICE had done its job in assessing the efficacy of the drug, and that the responsibility for postcode prescribing lay with the Department of Health.
‘The problem is not NICE,’ she said, ‘it’s the fact that nobody then goes out and monitors that what they’re saying is actually happening.”
Over 35,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed every year in the UK, and 14,000 patients die from the disease annually, making it the largest cancer killer for women.
