Malcolm Mulholland from Patient Voice Aotearoa said the reforms at Pharmac were set to speed up the assessment process, meaning the list of drugs approved for investment would increase quickly.<\/p>\n
“I think unless our politicians tackle this issue today, of which there are some 100 drugs that Pharmac want to fund, this issue is only going to get worse in a very short space of time,” Mulholland said.<\/p>\n
“Whilst today we might be talking about 100 drugs that Pharmac want to fund, it’s very realistic that in the space of a year to two, we could be talking about 400 drugs that Pharmac wants to fund.”<\/p>\n
Demand would also grow as the population aged, and as more medications were developed.<\/p>\n
Pharmac minister David Seymour said he agreed with Mulholland’s analysis.<\/p>\n
“In this government we’ve had record funding increases,” he said. “In my party capacity I will be campaigning for even more medicine funding in future budgets.”<\/p>\n
Pharmac’s chief medical officer and director of advice and assessment, Dr David Hughes, said it was committed to making processes more timely, including the assessment of new medicines.<\/p>\n
“As we work through the current backlog of historic applications, we expect the Options for Investment (OFI) list to grow, helping ensure that more medicines can be considered for future funding,” he said in a statement.<\/p>\n
There were currently around 190 medicine funding applications awaiting assessment, he said.<\/p>\n
“We are focused on reducing the time between an application being accepted and being assessed and ranked on our priority list.”<\/p>\n
To support this, he said Pharmac had recruited additional health economists and expert advisory staff, and was trialling more efficient assessment and advice processes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Malcolm Mulholland from Patient Voice Aotearoa said the reforms at Pharmac were set to speed up the assessment…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":509937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[134,524,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-537392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-medication","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/509937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}