Thank you, once again, Presiding Officer. I am pleased to announce that the new treatment fund is now established and I will be releasing, immediately, £12 million for the first tranche of funding for this year. The new treatment fund was a key commitment that we put before the people of Wales in May 2016 and we are delivering on that commitment. Our commitment was to invest £80 million over the life of this Government in a new treatment fund. We are delivering, with the new fund providing an additional £16 million each year, for five years, to speed up access to new medicines in Wales.

The fund will support health boards to make all new medicines recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and the All Wales Medicines Strategy Group available faster and more consistently across Wales. I wrote to Assembly Members this morning, providing the detail of how the new treatment fund will operate. The new fund will benefit patients in Wales in three key areas. All new recommended medicines will be made available within two months of the recommendation being published, rather than the current three months. Medicines recommended by NICE will be made available within two months of the first publication of the final appraisal determination, rather than waiting for the final technology appraisal guidance, which is published after the appeal period, which can be up to eight weeks later. And, new cancer medicines given an interim recommendation by NICE will also be available to patients in Wales within these same timescales.

The new treatment fund has been designed to treat all conditions equally. We recognise that each person affected by a condition that impacts upon their life will want to be assured that the Welsh Government is just as interested in their situation by making sure all new recommended medicines are introduced as quickly as possible and consistently no matter where an individual lives within Wales, and that is not an approach that has been taken in other parts of the UK. The Welsh Government has already provided an extra £200 million for NHS Wales in the 2016-17 budget to fund the ongoing impact of demand for health services and pay and other cost increases, as was set out in the recent Health Foundation report, ‘The path to sustainability’. This additional funding of £80 million over the life of this Government for the new treatment fund represents a significant further investment that will deliver that faster and more consistent early introduction of new medicines.

We recognize that new medicines and treatments are being discovered, developed and tested all of the time, offering the hope of a cure or a better quality of life for people with a range of life-threatening illnesses. This significant investment will help remove uncertainties around funding for new treatments in the future and help NHS Wales prepare sustainable plans for the introduction of new medicines. The £12 million I am making available now will be used to help support the all-Wales delivery of new and effective medicines recommended since April last year. This includes new medicines to treat prostate and ovarian cancer, muscular dystrophy and heart failure. Each one of these carries an annual cost of around £1 million.

It will also be used to support the introduction of new medicines recommended in the last few months, plus those coming through the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence pipeline this month. That includes new medicines to treat cancer, severe psoriasis, hepatitis C, the treatment of cystic fibrosis in children under six, severe asthma, and a new drug that represents a much-needed treatment option for rare and life-threatening lung diseases. All of these diseases are life threatening and/or debilitating, and these new medicines address an unmet clinical need or represent a step change in treatment. The £12 million that I am releasing now to health boards will support the fast and consistent delivery of all of these important new medicines that have been recommended.

The final tranche of £4 million for this financial year will be released to health boards later this month to support the fast introduction of these medicines and to enable health boards to plan more effectively to introduce new medicines coming through the appraisal pipeline between now and the end of March 2017.

During 2017, we will be improving the medicines appraisal forward look to facilitate the funding being released in advance at regular intervals throughout each year of the fund and to support early planning to introduce the new medicines. I will be issuing new directions to health boards before the end of the month to ring-fence the fund for the purpose of supporting the introduction of newly recommended medicines. We’ll also be monitoring the take-up of new medicines and the reduction in timescales, because I want to be clear that the fund is being used for its purpose and that it is making a real difference.

To further support access to medicines in Wales, I will continue to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to work with NHS Wales on supporting our agenda to make new recommended medicines available quickly. The industry has a key role to play in supporting and improving our forward planning linked with longer-term financial forecasting and assisting health boards to identify at the earliest possible stage where infrastructure and/or service reconfiguration are needed to support the introduction of a new medicine. If our healthcare system is to deliver a sustainable, responsive approach to the introduction of new medicines that is fast and responsible, we need a concerted joint effort between industry, NHS Wales and the Welsh Government, and this message was well received when I spoke at the annual conference of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry in November last year.

This Government pledged to deliver a new treatment fund to give the people of Wales fast access to new, innovative and effective treatments. I am proud to confirm that we’re delivering on our commitment in the first year of this Government and ‘Taking Wales Forward’. I’ll report on progress with the operation of the new fund before the summer recess.