02.02.12
Select criteria
Judgements on whether a new drug should be available on the NHS or not are often controversial, especially for those who have contributed to the research during development, and for those patients who could benefit from the treatment.
Cancer Research UK is opposing NICE’s latest ruling on abiraterone, claiming that the drug should have been assessed on different criteria, which may have led to a different decision.
The same could be argued for any drug; use a different set of factors by which to judge it and you could ‘prove’ that it was value for money.
Whether a drug receives approval depends on this test, and which aspects of its performance are to be given more weight. By picking and choosing the types of assessment, objectivity about the drugs usefulness and applicability to the NHS becomes meaningless, as the outcome has been decided ahead of the testing process.
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