Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking with NHS England and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to help local drugs and therapeutics networks to improve access to off-patent drugs.

Off-patent drugs are those whose patent period has expired and they are widely used in the National Health Service now. Drugs can also be prescribed ‘off-label’ outside of their licensed indication(s) to individual patients where doctors consider it is clinically appropriate to do so. Prescribing decisions are rightly a matter for clinicians in discussion with their patients.

We are in the process of setting up a round-table discussion with key stakeholders, including NHS England and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to explore opportunities for supporting appropriate use of off-label drugs outside their licensed indications where the evidence supports this.