Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government has taken to enable access agreements for rare disease medicines that do not meet the Highly Specialised Technology criteria.
Drug companies have been able to propose patient access schemes, and more recently other commercial arrangements, for products undergoing the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) appraisal for a number of years. Such arrangements have enabled NICE to recommend many products for use on the National Health Service that it may not otherwise have been able to recommend.