Rare disease medicines approval
Deputy O'Sullivan follows on from cancer medicine delays to raise broader concerns about long reimbursement waits for new drugs, including for rare diseases. Minister Donohoe says the Health Minister is working on the issue and that trade-offs over very costly treatments are being considered at Cabinet level.
Following on from the question posed earlier by Deputy Gino Kenny, my query concerns a related matter. I again raise the issue of rare diseases. Earlier this month, an article was published in The Lancet Oncology review journal by Professor Mark Lawler of Queen's University Belfast on Ireland's excessive waiting times for the reimbursement of the cost of medicines. Ireland's excessive approval times were compared with those in other countries, such as the UK and Germany. Accessing new cancer medicines here took an average of 20 months. In the UK, it took nine months, while in Germany, which admittedly has far greater resources, it took an average of four months. I know we have invested significant funding into the treatment of rare diseases over the last three budgets, and I hope this will continue in future, but it is the process here that needs to be overhauled. It is this process that I continually raise here. It is not the issue of funding that is the problem but of how we reimburse the costs of these medicines and how we can save people the agonising waiting times we have here.
Comment on this
I thank the Deputy. The Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, is working on this issue now. It has been the subject of discussion at our Cabinet subcommittee which deals with health policy. As the Deputy acknowledged, it is no longer an issue of the funding of new drugs. The Deputy will also appreciate the trade-offs and balances involved in this context. A patient and a family desperately want a new form of treatment to be made available, but at times the cost of such a treatment can be so high that any Government across the world would grapple with the trade-offs in this respect. The Minister is examining this matter at present. He brought forward an initiative to the Government this week regarding how we can make greater use of biosimilars, which I think is the phrase used, that is, generic drugs. In tandem with this approach, he is looking at what steps can be taken to step up the process the Deputy referred to. We are aware of the anguish and difficulty patients face as they are waiting for an outcome from the current procedure.