Response to Conservative Party news on availability of cancer drugs
4 April 2010
Rose Woodward, herself a survivor of kidney cancer and Patient Advocate for the James Whale Fund for Kidney Cancer said “On behalf of the James Whale Fund for kidney Cancer and my fellow kidney cancer patients, we welcome the news today that Conservative Party will set up a Fund to enable patients suffering from rarer cancers to get the cancer drugs they desperately need.
Over the past 4 years, on behalf of terminally cancer patients from all over the Country, we have been pleading in front of jury’s of PCT administrators to allow patients to have proven, innovative cancer drugs that Clinicians want to prescribe. By anyone’s standards it is cruel and callous to refuse to treat vulnerable patients who are already having to cope with a diagnosis of a serious cancer.
At the James Whale Fund we are passionate believers in the NHS and universal care. We welcome the day when it is the Doctor who will decide what drugs he will prescribe for his patient not an administrator sitting behind a desk far away from the Hospital.
N I C E (National Institute of Health & Clinical Excellence) denies drugs on the basis of cost, but Oncologists want to prescribe drugs on the basis of clinical effectiveness and the needs of their patients.
Cancer patients need to know the NHS will be there for them when they most need it and at the moment they are being let down. The NHS must stop saying to cancer patients “You are too expensive for us to keep you alive.”
Rose Woodward.
Patient Advocate for the James Whale Fund for Kidney Cancer.
Founder of the Kidney Cancer Support Network
