A House of Commons committee has called for NICE to revise its approach on assessing treatments, to provide faster decisions on new medicines and technologies. The committee recommended that a “rough and ready” approach, similar to that used in Scotland, should be adopted.
MPs also called for NICE to carry out appraisals on all new treatments and not just the most expensive, such as cancer drugs used in hospitals. The report claims that this means that Trusts tend to focus on these expensive treatments often at the expense of highly effective, cheaper alternatives that can be prescribed by a GP. They further highlighted concerns over the basis on which decisions are made. New treatments are usually only used if they cost under £30,000 for each year of good health they provide, but MPs said that there is no scientific basis for this threshold.
