The Interim Cancer Drugs Fund and Cancer Drugs Fund
The Cancer Drugs Fund has been introduced in
response to a report by the National Cancer Director, Professor Sir
Mike Richards, which showed that the UK (including England) lagged
well behind the rest of Europe in access to cancer (and other)
treatments.
The aim of the Fund is to address this discrepancy in England -
by increasing access to effective cancer treatments that have
either been turned down by the National Institute for Health and
Clinical Excellence (NICE), usually on cost grounds, or have not
yet been appraised by NICE.
A six months Interim Cancer Drugs Fund of £50 million was
introduced in October 2010. The £50 million has been divided up
between the ten Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) in England and
each SHA has determined its own way of processing the Fund and, in
some cases, which treatments should be made routinely available
through it.
From April 2011, the Fund will increase to £200 million a year
for three years; this period covers that of the current
Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS), a long standing
negotiated, rather than statutory, pricing agreement between the
pharmaceutical industry and the Department of Health, which
currently ends in January 2014. The plan is to introduce a new
Value Based Pricing system from January 2014, which will seek to
determine the cost of new treatments in line with their value and
agree a treatment's price before it is licensed.
We are grateful to the Rarer Cancers Foundation for the work they have
done in summarising the application of the Fund across the country,
which we have drawn upon in the context of bowel cancer
specifically.
