Pharmac announces funding for two type-2 diabetes medicines
Kim Dennis will book an appointment with her doctor.
The 67-year-old with type-2 diabetes spent six years taking dulaglutide as part of a trial but found her health deteriorated when the trial ended.
Now Dennis could be one of about 50,000 high-risk diabetes patients who will be able to access new medicines dulaglutide – once it gains MedSafe approval – and empagliflozin from February 1 following a Pharmac funding announcement yesterday.
‘‘They saw the light at last,’’ she said.
Criteria to access the medicines will also target Ma¯ori and Pacific patients for the first time.
The new medicines, which manage blood sugar levels as well as health complications such as kidney failure and heart disease, were due to be funded on Decem
ber 1 but state medicine-buying agency Pharmac said it needed more time to consider feedback.
It has now added Ma¯ori and Pacific ethnicities to the criteria, although you do not have to be Ma¯ori and Pacific to access the drugs.
The changes to the criteria should ensure those at high risk of heart and kidney complications can access the treatments, chief executive Sarah Fitt said.
Including Ma¯ori or Pacific ethnicity in the criteria was ‘‘an intentional move to proactively promote equity of access to these treatments for population groups who are at high risk of complications of type-2 diabetes and for whom there is direct evidence of inequities in access to medicines’’, she said.
The move was also expected to help younger patients with type-2 diabetes, a progressive condition that can end with kidney failure or limb amputation.
Porirua GP Dr Sean Hanna said his youngest patient with diabetes in the last 12months was aged 13. ‘‘Most of my patients are Ma¯ori and Pacific, and I have a disproportionate number of patients with type-2 diabetes,’’ he said.
Racism in the health system also played a role, he added.
‘‘Really it’s in the impacts of colonisation; the marginalisation of Ma¯ori in a health system developed to serve the largest number of people. There is systemic racism in the health system.’’
Dr Bryan Betty, medical director of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said people of Ma¯ori and Pacific ethnicity often got the disease earlier and had disproportionately poorer health outcomes.
‘‘Ma¯ori and Pacific patients are seven to 12 times more likely to progress to end-stage renal failure compared with Europeans. This situation obviously needs to drastically improve,’’ he said.
Type-2 diabetes, the most common type, is primarily a disease of middle-aged and older people related to excess weight, diet and lack of physical activity. As many as 250,000 New Zealanders have diabetes. People of Ma¯ori, Pacific and South Asian ethnicities are particularly at risk for genetic reasons.
Ma¯ori experience chronic kidney disease at three times the rate of non-Ma¯ori, non-Pacific New Zealanders, while Ma¯ori and Pacific Island children are 18 times more likely to develop type2 diabetes than are European children.