Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:39 pm on 10 January 2017.
Can I thank the Cabinet Secretary for his statement? I very much welcome this announcement today and the additional funding that comes with it. I’m also very pleased that the money that’s going to be going out to health boards is going to be ring-fenced and monitored. With that in mind, I would just like to ask: my experience in Aneurin Bevan health board is that they are actually very, very quick at making drugs available to patients once they’ve been through the appraisal process, so I do have a little bit of a niggling concern that, by setting timescales for all health boards, there is a danger that things may fall behind in other health boards where the performance has been, to date, very, very good. So, can I just ask you about that, and also ask you about the mechanism for actually allocating the resources to each health board? Will it go out on a formula? Will it be done on the basis of need? Because I also wouldn’t want to see us paying health boards that haven’t been performing when organisations like Aneurin Bevan health board have been delivering, as far as I can see, very well in this area.
The other point that I wanted to raise was in relation to the AWMSG and the way that it works. I welcome the tone of your statement where you talk about the concerted joint effort between industry, NHS Wales and the Welsh Government. I was grateful to you for meeting with me recently to talk about Avastin, and also to Roche for coming to see me about it, but I understand that one of the problems that Roche have had is lack of information from AWMSG, unlike the Scottish medicines authority and NICE, who give detailed information on the reasons for declining an appraisal. They haven’t been able to get that information from AWMSG. So, can I ask that that’s something that you look at so that we can make sure that this process, which is key now to accessing this extra funding, is as transparent and as open as possible?