Only one in five drugs of any benefit
The Cancer Drugs Fund, a 1.27 billion ‘extra’ fund pledged by the UK’s incoming Conservative Government to help cancer patients with new and expensive drugs, has been dubbed a huge waste of money because the vast majority of the drugs were of no benefit.
In a study published in the Annals of Oncology, of the 47 drugs being supplied prior to the delisting only 18 per cent met International Standards of efficacy! Of the ones that did work, the increased survival time averaged just 3.2 months.
Lead researcher Prof Richard Sullivan, from King’s College London told the BBC that politicians, leading doctors and cancer charities were all guilty of laziness and populism. He added that the plan had proven to be a “huge waste of money”.
Although the fund only started in 2010, by 2015 the committee that controlled the fund started delisting drugs, striking off more than half the treatments from the list because they were expensive and didn’t work.
The money could have been used to provide 10,000 more nurses.
