MPs: ‘get on with VBP’
pharmafile | January 18, 2013 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | NHS, NICE, PPRS, VBP
An influential group of MPs has hit out at inactivity over moves towards value-based pricing (VBP), saying that the issue must be sorted out in the next six weeks.
In a strongly-worded statement, the House of Commons health select committee’s report on NICE recommended that the Department of Health “should bring this uncertainty to an end no later than the end of March 2013”.
The new pricing regime is due to be in operation from January 2014, and pharma, doctors and patients need to know what is happening, the MPs insisted.
“We do not regard it as acceptable that the arrangements for VBP have still not been settled and that those who will have to work with those arrangements are still unclear about what VBP will mean in practice,” the report said.
“There has been extensive discussion of the principle of VBP but it remains a source of concern that so little progress has been made on defining this nebulous concept,” it went on.
Incredulity was expressed that the VBP consultation was launched more than two years ago, and the response to it was published 18 months ago – and yet there is still no decision despite “the apparently modest implications of the proposed changes”.
However, the report points out that since only 30 or so new NICE appraisals happen each year, the majority of drugs “will for the foreseeable future continue to be procured under a variant of the current Pharmaceutical Price Regulation System (PPRS)”.
ABPI chief executive Stephen Whitehead said the committee is right to “highlight the impact of continuing uncertainty over future medicines pricing”.
He insisted that talks between the ABPI and DH on switching from PPRS to VBP are ongoing, but added: “These negotiations are confidential.”
Ethical Medicines Industry Group chairman Leslie Galloway called for ‘greater clarity’ on VBP, saying: “The uncertainty in developing a new pricing system for innovative medicines must be addressed as a priority.”
The select committee looked at a number of other issues, including what it believes should be a legal obligation on pharma companies to ensure that regulators, including NICE, have access to all available research about the efficacy and safety of drugs.
“All information arising from drug trials should be in the public domain in an accessible and properly anonymised form, including any negative information,” the MPs said.
The pharma industry should introduce a new code of practice covering research, the report suggests.
The committee was particularly concerned by Sir Andrew Dillon’s evidence that NICE are making drug appraisals of drugs without access to all relevant data.
The report also highlighted the Cancer Drugs Fund, which is due to be mothballed in a year’s time.
The MPs say that before this happens there needs to be an assessment of the outcomes for those patients whose treatment the fund has paid for to determine its impact.
If it proves to have been successful, then VBP needs to build on what works and apply this to treatments for conditions other than cancer.
Finally, the government must establish how drugs which have been funded can continue to be made available to individual patients.
Adam Hill
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