NICE drug evaluations have not been discredited, says Prime Minister
Prime Minister Tony Blair has defended the National Institute for Health
and Clinical Excellence as a way of evaluating drugs for use by the NHS.
He denied that the NICE process had been discredited.
Mr Blair was speaking at a press conference organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors earlier this week and he told The Journal: “I think people should remember what happened before NICE.”
The Prime Minister said: “The idea of having an institute that can evaluate drugs is extremely important. When NICE evaluates a drug and says that this is helpful for these categories of people, the Government has got a commitment that it will fund it. You do need that objective process.”
Mr Blair conceded that when a new drug comes on to the market some people want to use it and some clinicians want to prescribe it immediately. “We in Government — unless we are going to say we are going to write a cheque for it — have got to have some objective way of assessing whether it is sensible to fund it. But once NICE has made a recommendation we give guidance to the [primary care organisations] as to what they should do and to stop the postcode lottery of drugs. It is very difficult before NICE makes a recommendation for us to step in because we do not know what the evidence base is and what we would be basing our judgement on.”
The whole reason why NICE was established, he argued, was that people complained that without the proper objective evidence base how did the NHS know whether it was the right thing to fund something or not. “And while we may be running into these issues here [such as Herceptin], people abroad are looking at it and saying this is the way we should be going. I know no better way,” he added. |
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