Patients in England can get early access to more cutting-edge medicines through a new fund.
The Innovative Medicines Fund (IMF) works like the existing Cancer Drugs Fund (CDF), fast-tracking promising treatments, even if they are expensive and have not yet been approved for routine NHS use.
It will cover potentially life-saving drugs for rare and genetic diseases. The government has allocated up to £680m a year to be shared by the funds.
The IMF, like the CDF, will mean a newly approved medicine could be prescribed immediately, before final recommendations on it are drawn up by the advisory body that weighs the cost versus benefit of drugs used by the NHS - an organisation called NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence).
Patients would be able to access the treatment while data is collected for NICE to determine whether the medicine is affordable and effective enough to offer more widely.
A similar fund for innovative treatments - the New Medicines Fund - already exists in Scotland. Wales has a New Treatments Fund that helps pay for high-cost drugs which have been recommended as cost-effective by NICE.
Experts hope funds like these will improve the lives of many who might otherwise miss out.
Source: BBC News, 7 June 2022
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