Meeting of the Parliament 20 June 2018
I commend my colleague and friend Anas Sarwar for his persistent focus on access to medicines, which has allowed us to devote Labour’s debating time to the issue today.
I will share my experience of supporting constituents who have cancer, and I want to make three points: about the wider situation that faces the NHS; about the Montgomery review—in particular, the replacement for individual patient treatment requests; and about Jen Hardy and her battle for Perjeta.
I inform the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport that a woman came to my surgery on Friday to see me about a family member who had waited more than a year for an endoscopy from NHS Lothian. She never got the treatment that she needed and died from stomach cancer earlier this year. Today’s debate about access to medicine has to be seen in the wider context of the pressures on our NHS—in particular, the Government’s consistent failure to deliver on treatment time guarantees, and the fact that cancer is no exception to that record of failure.
I am pleased that the Government has accepted the Montgomery review recommendations to replace IPTRs with the new PACS tier 2 system, as Anas Sarwar mentioned. I have direct experience of trying to support two constituents in the IPTR process: one was successful and one was not. The first was a woman who walked into a constituency surgery a few years ago who needed help to fill out the paperwork for IPTR to access the drug Kadcyla for breast cancer. She was ultimately successful, but I believe that that was only because of the sheer force and pressure that was put behind the campaign by Breast Cancer Now, which did formidable work in fighting for that drug.
The second constituent whom I tried to support in an IPTR was a woman who had bowel cancer. One of the hardest things that I have ever had to do as an MSP was visit her in her house in Edinburgh and have a conversation about why she could not get the drug that she needed after she had devoted her entire career to the NHS. She was a paediatric nurse: every waking moment of her working life had been spent in the national health service, but I was sitting in her living room trying to explain why she could not get the drug that would have saved her life. Sadly, she passed away in February this year, having never had the treatment that she needed.
We have heard from Miles Briggs and others about the situation that is facing Jen Hardy. She should be spending her final months watching her daughter graduate and get married, and enjoying Christmas with her family, but she has been spending her time standing outside Parliament educating MSPs on a drug that would have given her 16 more months of life. The Government has been dragging its heels for a long time over Perjeta. In fact, we have been waiting longer than that drug would give Jen Hardy in extra months to spend with the people who desperately want her by their side.
If the cabinet secretary takes away one thing from the debate, it should be that she should, please, stop dragging her heels, because there are people who need the drugs now. Every member will have experienced trying to support a cancer patient through one of the most difficult experiences of their lives and who is being hit by the system time and again. The system is failing such patients and we could do much more to improve it. The power to do that lies in the health secretary’s hands. I hope that she steps up and uses it.
16:36