National Voices welcomes ‘top-ups’ report
National Voices welcomes ‘top-ups’ report
National Voices today welcomed the announcement by Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson, about improving access to medicines for NHS patients. Also welcome is the accompanying draft guidance for how the NHS should treat those patients who chose to supplement their NHS care by purchasing drugs which are unavailable on the NHS.
However, the guidance will need to be implemented very carefully to ensure that new systems do not create new problems for the NHS and its patients. To be most welcomed is the report's move towards creating a system that aims at clarity and honesty about the limits of NHS care, and accepts the need for collaboration and fairness between the various elements of the NHS, nationally and locally.
National Voices Chief Executive David Pink commented,
“NHS patients deserve faster and fairer access to new drugs, and we are very pleased to see proposals to improve NHS systems for introducing new treatments for all. We are also pleased that the Government commits the NHS to fairer systems for those people who can afford to pay for treatments over and above their NHS care. National Voices will continue to be engaged, as we have been so far, on and with the issues raised, to achieve the best outcomes possible for patients & carers."
Notes to Editors
National Voices is the new umbrella organisation established by and for the voluntary sector. It brings together all national voluntary organisations representing users of health and social care – service users, their carers and families – to give them a stronger voice in policy-making. Created as a result of the long-standing frustration within the voluntary sector at the failure of national policy to reflect the needs of individual service users, combined with the frustration at government level at their inability to get to the heart
of what service users think about the policies they make and the services they provide, National Voices has been created to remedy this state of affairs. It will represent service user voice organisations from right across the health and social care spectrum
For further information on this issue or on National Voices please contact Mark Platt on 020 7813 3645, or at mark.platt@nationalvoices.org.uk
