THE NHS is facing yet another dilemma as it celebrates its 60th anniversary. Founded on the principle of equal access based on need rather than ability to pay, the health service now finds itself confronted by patients quite willing to pay – just not for everything.
The problem is that the UK does not allow patients to pay privately for drugs that are not available on the NHS and continue to receive other aspects of their care paid for by the NHS.
Politicians are now under pressure to allow such co-payments
as increasingly expensive drugs are launched, but a cash-strapped NHS cannot pay for them. This week, Dr Peter Terry, the chairman of the British Medical Association in Scotland, said he believed not allowing co-payments was inhumane, punishing patients by making them pay for scans and blood tests that would otherwise be free on the NHS simply because they want to pay for certain drugs.
The issue is likely to cause debate at the BMA's conference in Edinburgh next week.
But while the English Health Secretary has launched a review on co-payments, the Scottish Government has yet to say how it intends to tackle the issue.
One cancer specialist in Glasgow said he had already seen patients who wanted to pay for a non-NHS drug and he had had to refer them to private care to receive that drug and other treatment.
"It will definitely become more of an issue as more expensive drugs come on the market but are not available on the NHS," he said. But he added that solving the problem of co-payments was not as simple as some might want to believe.
"I can see difficulties arising if you have two patients in an NHS hospital side by side, one who has managed to find the money to pay for a drug and another who hasn't.
"That would be a really difficult situation for them. It is definitely an issue we need to address and give guidance on as it will become more important in years to come."
Of course, making new drugs more cost effective for the NHS would help. But asking pharmaceutical companies to bring their prices down is a whole other battle.
The full article contains 383 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
