Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that Chemosat is made available on the NHS following its recommendation by NICE in 2021.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published guidance in 2021, through its interventional procedures programme, that recommends that chemosaturation can be used for patients with secondary liver metastases resulting from a primary ocular melanoma. For these patients, this procedure should only be used with special arrangements for clinical governance, consent, an audit, or research.

NICE’s interventional procedures guidance considers the safety and efficacy of a treatment, but not whether it represents value for money and if it should be funded by the National Health Service. Only recommendations which come from NICE’s technology appraisal or highly specialised technology evaluation carry the mandatory requirement for NHS funding.

It is therefore for NHS England to decide if the treatment should be made routinely available based on the available evidence, and NHS England’s clinical commissioning policy states that it will not routinely commission chemosaturation for liver metastases from ocular melanomas as evidence has shown only some short term-tumour benefits to the treatment. Both NHS England’s policy and NICE’s guidance will be reviewed if sufficient new evidence becomes available.

Furthermore, we will publish a new National Cancer Plan, which will include further details on how we will improve outcomes for cancer patients, including through improved treatment options.