<p>The Equality of Care for NHS Patients </p>

Part of 2. 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health, Well-being and Sport – in the Senedd at 2:28 pm on 7 December 2016.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:28, 7 December 2016

I thank the Member for the question. The case you highlight again reiterates how incredibly difficult these choices are—difficult for clinicians, difficult for the health service in meeting all the various and differing forms of need, in particular the highly specialist and individualised care that you point to, but most of all, incredibly difficult for the individual and their family. I think that’s why it’s important that we’ve agreed to have the review on the independent patient funding request, and that, together with the new treatment fund, demonstrates the commitment we do have to ensuring we do provide the best possible care where medicines are the answer—because they aren’t always the answer. So, I do look forward to what the review has to say about both the national process and the local processes for understanding how the individual patient funding requests are made. In particular, you’ll know that clinical exceptionality is a specific area of the review, and I look forward to receiving the report.

But this Government remains committed to providing the very best care possible, and we will remain committed on the very best basis, the very best evidence base, available to us. That won’t take away from the incredibly difficult decisions that individual clinicians and teams have to make, and that individual families make and have to face up to themselves. But I’m determined we will do the very best possible for each family, wherever they live in Wales.