LONDON, Oct 20 (APM) - Cancer patients in England and Wales could get easier access to 'innovative' drugs or treatments after the government backed new legislation which would give doctors legal protection against being sued.
The UK government, according to widespread press reports on Monday, has backed the Medical Innovation Bill, launched by Conservative peer Lord Saatchi, which will make it easier for doctors to try out new treatments on patients without fear of facing legal action if things go wrong.
Information on the UK parliament website shows the bill this week enters the committee stage in the upper house, the House of Lords, where politicians will give the legislation a line-by-line examination.
The bill is then set to go to the House of Commons, and could become law before March if no serious issues arise.
Press reports said the intervention of health secretary Jeremy Hunt makes the bill, which has divided the medical profession, much more likely to become law.
The bill gives leeway for doctors to foster “responsible innovation” and depart from approved treatments under certain circumstances, in cancers that would otherwise result in a patient’s death or cases specifically sanctioned by the health secretary.
In an emailed statement, healthcare analyst Ana Nicholls, from the Economist Intelligence Unit, said the bill has had a “chequered history” after the British Medical Association raised concerns that it did not offer enough patient safeguards.
This brings England and Wales closer to U.S. and WHO provisions that allowed Ebola treatments such as Zmapp to be used in an emergency, where no other treatment is available.
Bu Nicholls warned: “There may still be concerns about the effect on formal clinical trials for advanced cancer treatments. At present, patients who want access to experimental treatments and are willing to take the risks usually sign up for clinical trials. Last year, around 600,000 people in the UK were recruited, according to the NIHR Clinical Research Network.
But such trials rely on some patients receiving a placebo instead. If they can persuade their doctors to give them experimental treatments directly, then trial recruitment may drop.
“Nevertheless, the fact that so many patients are willing to enter trials does suggest that the demand for experimental medicines is very high, and that those facing death from cancer are likely to welcome the new bill."
The BMA told APM that it still did not support the bill. Meanwhile the General Medical Council, which regulates doctors, said existing arrangements allow for innovative treatments, where information about risks has been shared with patients.
The GMC doctors' regulator said in an emailed statement that it tentatively supported the bill following amendments that restricted the legislation to use in the most gravely ill patients.
The bill was prompted by the experiences of Lord Saatchi’s wife, who died of ovarian cancer.
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