Darren Millar
Responding to the announcement of a consultation into recommendations concerning the Welsh Government’s ‘Individual Patient Funding Request’ process, which is the patient’s last resort when medicines have been rejected for NHS use on cost grounds, Darren Millar AM, Shadow Minister for Health, said:
“Under Labour, patients face a postcode lottery in accessing life-extending medicines, where the same patient could get a completely different ruling on drug entitlement depending on where they live.
“The Individual Patient Funding Request process has been inconsistent, unnecessarily complex and too often is a bureaucratic nightmare for vulnerable and chronically ill patients.
“Labour Ministers have conceded that more medicines, which have been rejected by NICE on cost grounds, are made available to patients in England than in Wales, where the Welsh Labour Government has imposed deep NHS budget cuts.
“There remains considerable work to do to improve access to medicines for the treatment of exceptionally rare diseases, where cross-border co-operation is vital to ensure equity of access with patients in other parts of the UK and Europe.”
