Fears that funding cuts for new medicines will see Ireland fall behind
CUTTING funding for innovative new medicines next year is ‘unsustainable’ and will see Ireland fall further behind other European countries, former Fine Gael TD Kate O’Connell has warned.
Ms O’Connell, who is now a frontline pharmacist, criticised the Government’s refusal to provide extra health spending for next year, saying ‘cutting off the money’ will result in patients suffering and could be more expensive in the long run.
Although a record €22.5bn was earmarked for Health, Minister Stephen Donnelly received less than half of the €2bn he was seeking to fund existing services and new initiatives, and no new funding has yet been provided for new drugs next year.
Ms O’Connell told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘Ireland is notoriously slow, before they even stopped the budget, at reimbursing new medicines.
‘Often you’d have the UK ahead of us. Now I’m not saying we should always follow the UK, but you’d equally often have our European counterparts ahead of us.’
While the health budget for medicines has grown in recent years, Ms O’Connell said this is a reflection of the increase in prices of new innovative drugs.
The former Dublin Bay South TD said: ‘There’s a whole explosion in terms of high tech drugs which are expensive, progressive medicines, and they’re costing a huge amount of money – but my view is that you should never stop reimbursing new drugs because you need innovation within the sector.
‘You need innovation in medicines because it keeps us ahead of things. If you ever needed an example of why you needed to be innovating, it was proven with Covid.’
The Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA) estimates more than 4,000 patients will miss out on critical new medicines next year as a result of the funding gap.
The IPHA has planned for medicines to treat seven types of cancer in 2024 as well as new drugs to treat cardiovascular disease, migraine and chronic kidney disease in adults with type 2 diabetes.
Ms O’Connell said new expensive drugs must be viewed in the context of the additional savings they can provide to our health services.
She told the MoS: ‘If there are far fewer hospital admissions, which is often the case with modern drugs – they’re once monthly and can be delivered through the prescription service in the pharmacy. You can have a huge saving in terms of the price of secondary healthcare and acute services, hospital admissions and GP visits.
‘Most importantly, you are improving the quality of life for the patient.
‘If you don’t fund the research and the innovation, you are going to kill it and patients will suffer because they have no medical product available to them. This is not just random untested stuff, this is medicine proven to work and be cost effective.’