WalesOnline reports on confirmation by the Welsh Government that it is to publish data on patients’ requests for funding for drugs, following FOI requests that revealed “large disparities in the number of requests for funding for cancer drugs not approved by the All-Wales Medicines Strategy Group (AWMSG) or the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice).
“Some health boards refused two-thirds of these funding requests, while others declined just 15%.”
The data is to be published on a health board basis, rather than at a national level.
Lynne Neagle, Labour AM for Torfaen, noted that the same data has been published in England at strategic health authority level “for some time”
How to find the data
First Minister Carwyn Jones said that the Government was “finalising with the LHBs the template that would be used to make that information available.”
The article also suggests that some information may still be held back because of fears around the identification of patients.
It is worth setting up a Google alert for when information is published – for example, based on a search like “funding requests” site:wales.nhs.uk.
To find similar data in England, try the following advanced search techniques:
- drug funding requests England SHA site:nhs.uk filetype:xls
- drug funding requests England SHA site:nhs.uk
- drug funding requests England SHA site:nhs.uk filetype:pdf
(Replace nhs.uk with your own strategic health authority web address to narrow the searches further)
