The NHS
has spent almost £1bn giving 74,000 cancer patients drugs rejected by
the medicines regulator but does not know if they have extended their
lives, the National Audit Office has said.
In a new report released, the NAO castigated the NHS and
Department of Health’s failure to collect data on the outcomes
experienced by patients helped by the Cancer Drugs Fund as a major weakness.
Meg Hillier, the Labour MP who chairs the public accounts committee,
said the NHS and the Department of Health’s failure to ensure data
collation “makes no sense” and made it impossible to judge if the scheme
had succeeded in extending patients’ survival.
The budgets of other NHS services have also suffered as a result of
spending sums as large as £416m a year on the fund, the public spending
watchdog found.While some patients have received drugs costing less than £10,000,
others got medication costing more than £100,000. Initially the fund
underspent its budget by 28%. But recently it has overshot it and is
likely to spend £70m more than planned in 2015-16, the NAO said.Heidi Alexander,
the shadow health secretary, said the scaling back of the fund
represented a broken promise by the Conservatives, who had pledged to
continue investing if re-elected in May.
She said: “The Tories promised to fix the broken system for funding
cancer medicines in the last parliament, but failed to do so. Now they
are having to remove drugs from the Cancer Drugs Fund, breaking one of
David Cameron’s key election pledges to cancer patients.”
The Department of Health said it remained committed to the fund.
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