NHS: Drugs
(asked on 14th July 2016) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what account NHS England has to take of cost effectiveness and the effects of costs when prioritising the commissioning of new drugs.
In considering policies placed before it, the Clinical Priorities Advisory Group (CPAG) will follow the published procedure which was subject to recent public consultation.
The procedure followed can be found here:
Policies are first grouped according to clinical advice by CPAG into three categories of patient benefit, and then three categories of cost. This methodology allows for the proposals to be split into five levels of cost/benefit. Policies with the greatest clinical benefit and lowest cost will attract the highest priority recommendation (level 1), while those with lowest clinical benefit and high cost will attract the lowest (level 5).
These recommendations are then used to inform commissioning decisions by the Specialised Commissioning Oversight Group. These are ratified by the Specialised Services Commissioning Committee of the NHS England board.