June 2008 Archives

Just seven days after I demanded that the Government speed up the approval of new medicines it has announced it plans to do just that.

At present it can take up to three years to officially approve a potentially life-saving new treatment in England.

Health minister Lord Darzi has now declared that should be cut to six months.

Now I am not for one moment suggesting that a word or two in my Sunday Mercury column about the Government sitting on its hands while good people died has had any influence on this decision.

But this ought to a moment for at least some limited satisfaction.

Except it's not.

This is New Labour we are talking about. And so far what we have is a proposal - in Lord Darzi's blueprint for the future of the NHS - that a speed-up operation is required.

So first the proposal has to be approved, then become a plan, then it has to be implemented.

And given this Government's monumental failure to bring about real change in the NHS over the past ten years, nobody should be holding their breath.

It was, of course, a New Labour initiative - from the then Health Secretary Frank Dobson (remember him?) - that created these shameful delays in the first place.

He did it by creating the National Institute for Clinical Excellence at the tail end of the last century.

With supreme irony, the chief aim of NICE was supposed to be speed-up the implementation of new technology and the end of the so-called postcode lottery for prescribing.

The reality was been quite the opposite.

And the introduction of NICE introduced yet one more major NHS unfairness. Those who could afford to pay for the new drugs that were stuck in the NICE approval system had a chance of living.

Those who couldn't find around £4,000 a month to keep themselves alive were simply supposed to slip quietly away. Or move home to Scotland where, remarkably, a new drug is usually available for NHS use around two years sooner than in England.

The question now is how many more English people will have to die before Lord Darzi and his boss health secretary Alan Johnson turn this "speed-up" plan into reality. And reverse the appalling unfairness and inequity that their Government has inflicted on the terminally ill.

Stay well.