NICE rejects ‘benefit’ test
pharmafile | January 28, 2014 | News story | Sales and Marketing | Dillon, EMIG, NHS, NICE, benefits
NICE has refused to include a ‘wider societal benefit’ test into its deliberations about which drugs should be available on the NHS, saying that it would have a disproportionate impact on elderly patients.
Notes from a NICE board meeting published by The Guardian, say: “However broadly the concept is drawn, our age has an impact on what we are able to contribute and what we take from society.”
Regardless of the way the proposals in this paper are incorporated into the appraisal process, “NICE will not allow age itself to tip the balance of a recommendation against the use of a treatment”, the notes went on.
Pharma may well be pleased that NICE has come out against what many saw as a somewhat nebulous concept.
The sector had voiced concern about this question because, as Ethical Medicines Industry Group (EMIG) chairman Leslie Galloway told Pharmafocus last year, “there is no definitive agreement on how benefits will be classified”.
NICE chief executive Sir Andrew Dillon said the Department of Health, which asked NICE to consider introducing this judgment on wider societal benefits, would recognise that the watchdog had thought about the issue carefully.
“[We] haven’t just said it is not a concept we are interested in,” he told The Guardian. “I think they will probably appreciate that we have taken their thinking and exposed it to the rights and wrongs of decision-making.”
The notes of the NICE board meeting add: “It would be quite wrong for NICE to use the simple fact of the age distribution of people with particular conditions as the basis for deciding whether or not the NHS should offer new treatments, just as it would be wrong to use gender or any of the other protected characteristics under the equalities legislation.”
In any discussion of a drug’s cost-effectiveness, an 85-year-old should not be seen as less important than a 25-year-old, Sir Andrew said. But he acknowledged: “All of this is a challenge.”
Meanwhile, the consultation into how NICE will assess drugs under the new drug pricing scheme is being drawn up and will start in February. “We want comments from as wide an audience as possible,” a NICE spokesman said. The consultation will last three months.
Adam Hill
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