People with rarer cancers 'still denied access to treatments'
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is failing to follow its own guidance aimed at making live-extending treatments available on the NHS, leaving many patients with rarer forms of cancer without drugs that could prolong their lives, a campaign group has said.
The Rarer Cancers Forum looked at recent progress made in improving access to treatment for people with 'rarer cancers' - an umbrella term encompassing between 30 and 50 per cent of all cancers.
Its 'Exceptional Progress?' report suggests that, while five treatments have been approved since the publication of new supplementary advice from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) on appraising life-extending drugs, four treatments that could have benefited up to 16,000 patients have been rejected during the same period.
These treatments are bevacizumab, sorafenib, sunitinib and temsirolimus - all of which can be used to treat advanced kidney cancer.
Sorafenib and temsirolimus were rejected even though end of life criteria were fulfilled, with NICE claiming that the cost of the drugs was too high to justify their use on the NHS at the expense of other cancer treatments.
As well as failing to follow the recommendations made following the top-up review, the Rarer Cancer Forum is concerned that NICE is still not assessing drugs quickly enough.
In November 2008, the government announced that by 2010, NICE would take just six months to assess new cancer drugs by 2010, but the report shows that the institute typically still takes 21 months.
It also reveals that over 1,000 patients a year with rare cancers have to plead with NHS managers to obtain the drugs they need.
Sixty per cent of patients said that they could not understand their primary care trust's cancer policy, while 49 per cent did not know how long they should expect to wait for a decision on their treatment.
Andrew Wilson, chief executive of the Rarer Cancers Forum, commented: "Although progress has been made in improving access to cancer treatments since the publication of the top-ups review, there is still more to do.