A committee of MPs has said in a report that the Cancer Drugs Fund, a special NHS-run fund for cancer medicines, needs to be managed more effectively and that the benefit to patients should be made clearer. In addition, more could be done for funding medicines for rarer cancers. The report, published on Tuesday, says there is an urgent need to improve how drugs are allocated across different parts of the NHS – particularly those which have been developed by private companies. 167m. In response, a spokesman for the NHS said "we hope their explicit call for cuts to cancer drugs prices charged to the fund will be borne in mind as complex decisions on its future are taken in the next few months. " The fund, set up in 2010 to improve access to cancer drugs not routinely available on the NHS, will have cost £1.27bn by April 2017 and helped over 80k patients.
A committee of MPs has said in a report that the Cancer Drugs Fund, a special NHS-run fund for cancer medicines, needs to be managed more effectively and that the benefit to patients should be made clearer. In addition, more could be done for funding medicines for rarer cancers. The committee also said there is little evidence the fund is a good use of taxpayers' money; the $480m budget for 2013-2015 was overspent by £167m. In response, a spokesman for the NHS said "we hope their explicit call for cuts to cancer drugs prices charged to the fund will be borne in mind as complex decisions on its future are taken in the next few months." The fund, set up in 2010 to improve access to cancer drugs not routinely available on the NHS, will have cost £1.27bn by April 2017 and helped over 80k patients.