Over £1m of taxpayers’ money is said to have been given to a lobby group by health trusts to stop certain patients getting vital drugs. The CSAS, or Commissioning Support Appraisals Service, give advice and training to trusts on how they can avoid paying for new and expensive drugs that had been approved by the NHS’s rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
When drugs are first approved, trusts have to find the money to pay for them from their existing budgets. There is widespread concern that the CSAS has a vested interest in actively discouraging NICE to approve the new treatments, by using the fact that they are not cost effective and too expensive as arguments against the approvals.
The CSAS has already been attacked by charities, leading doctors and also Andrew Lansley, the health secretary. It has now emerged that each one of the152 primary care trusts in England are paying CSAS £2000 each year for its services, a total of £304,000 a year. As the PCT’s having been handing over this money since 2009, the total paid out by end of 201 will be almost £1m.
That cash could let more than 50 sufferers of multiple Sclerosis take the first ever medication developed for the condition, or 50 sufferers of bowel cancer have a year’s treatment on the banned drug Avastin. The MS drug, Fingolimod is a pill taken once a day and halves the number of relapses and experts widely believe that it could replace both injections and expensive infusions for thousands of sufferers, but NICE said it wasn’t good value for money.
MS care in the UK is rated as the worst in Europe, and our cancer survival rates also lag way behind other countries. Money has always come first in the UK, and as long as money continues to take precedence over people’s health, the figures will stay that way.
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