
The NHS spends more than £2 billion on cancer drugs each year in the UK. And with NHS budgets stretched, it’s critical these drugs offer value for money.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC), which decide whether a new drug is cost-effective for the NHS, have well-established ways to ensure this. But new challenges and new opportunities are always emerging, prompting the NHS to consider how to spend its money most effectively.
Clinical trials remain vital to ensure a drug is safe and effective. But with decisions on whether to make new drugs available being made sooner after their development, those trials give a less complete picture of a drug’s benefits. And at the same time, the NHS is collecting more data than ever before on how well patients respond to new drugs outside of clinical trials, after they’ve been introduced into the NHS.
Source: Cancer Research UK







