The chair of the Drugs Committee at the National Centre for Pharmaeconomics, Professor Michael Barry said they may need to look at what drugs they buy, but that if efficiencies are made then new drugs can be funded next year.
Prof Barry was speaking on RTÉ radio’s Today with Claire Byrne show in response to concerns that seriously ill patients may not be able to access potentially life-saving medicines next year due to the Government’s decision not to provide funding for new drugs in last week’s Budget.
Some of the “presentations” on this issue had been “quite dramatic”, he said. While there may be delays every effort would be made to ensure access to the necessary drugs, he said.
Overall drug expenditure at present was slightly in excess of €3.2 billion a year, said Prof. Barry. “I do believe we can make efficiencies which will be used to fund new drugs and we should be able to improve the situation.”
Efficiencies could be made particularly around the prescribing of biosimilar medications and also generic medications, he said.
“We must also look at what we're buying. There's the issue of value. We spend a lot of time looking at value for money of various medicines and just looking, for example, at the seven cancer medicines that we looked at in the first half of 2023.
"The expenditure on those seven medicines was estimated at €120 million for just seven medications.
“The point here is that the majority of them were not value for money when we assessed them.
“I think that we can, and we should be able to generate savings, and it would be nice then to put that into new medicines. Now whether we would generate enough to cover all the requirements, then that remains to be seen, to be honest.
"Of course it will take time for these savings to become available. And but I do think it's a mixture of the two, to be honest.
Prof. Barry acknowledged that there were cost pressures. Some drugs were costing €3 million per patient. There have already been 7,000 applications for a weight loss drug which was approved earlier this year.
The number of assessments each year on new drugs was rising, he said. When he started 20 years ago, there were four new medications per year, this year it had been over 100. “That gives you an example of the increase in volume, but also the increased expenditure.
“We would hope through efficiencies in the way we use our medicines, that we could create some financial headroom for new medicines. But whether that will be sufficient to answer all the demands is probably unlikely. So I think it should be a combination really of new funding plus efficiencies from our existing spend.”
Prof Barry said he was not sure that he agreed with claims that people could die because they could not avail of new drugs.
“I think that some of the presentations have been quite dramatic, and I'm not so sure I go along with that. I think there will be delays, but we will certainly be doing our best in the medicines management programme to ensure that people get access as quickly as they can.
“Our role is to evaluate the drug trade and get the true value that they offer and then get a fair price, and then also to ensure that they're used in the appropriate way. And that's the best we can do.”
