ABPI tells MPs what's needed to improve cancer services

Clinical trials must be restarted and access to new treatments improved if the NHS is to recover from its cancer backlog developed throughout the pandemic.

The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) is giving evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee for their inquiry into why cancer outcomes in England continue to fall behind comparable countries internationally. 

According to the ABPI cancer outcomes in the UK were improving before the pandemic. Whilst cancer rates were rising, deaths were declining in the UK and survival was increasing. However, the UK’s survival across a number of tumour types has fallen behind many European countries. The challenge now is to reverse the impact the pandemic has had on cancer services.

David Watson, the executive director for Patient Access at the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, will tell MPs that the system for cancer care needs to evolve if it is to address longer-term threats to services.

Watson will say that research and clinical trials should drive NHS recovery. One in six patients receive their cancer treatment through research programmes. Whilst countries like Germany and Spain have already recovered with patient enrolment up since the start of the pandemic. In England, the numbers are down by 15% versus 2019.

More so, more patients should be given access to newer cancer medicines. Watson will say that patients increasingly face a two-tiered system for treatment because cancer medicines are being given an ‘optimised recommendation’ by NICE that limits their access to a smaller group of patients than approved by the regulator. Half of all medicines given this recommendation between 2010 and 2019 are for cancer

New types of treatments also need to be treated differently by policymakers. Watson will argue that current rules  haven’t kept pace with scientific advances meaning that patients risk missing out on game-changing gene therapies because they don’t meet narrow ‘affordability’ tests set by NICE for older medicines, despite potentially saving the NHS money in the long run.