SPEND SMARTER ON NHS

It’s been pretty sickening this week watching NHS England try to wriggle out of paying for a game-changing drug called PrEP which stops HIV in its tracks.

And various sections of the media have been helping them – using more than a touch of homophobia – by suggesting the £ 400- a- month pi l l would encourage promiscuity and irresponsible behaviour.

Currently there are 104,000 people in the UK with HIV (6,151 new cases last year) and 85,500 of those are using HIV services. God knows how much the bill for that adds up to, but I bet it’s a lot more than the £20million a year this drug would cost.

Surely the best use of medicine is to prevent a disease – not wait till someone gets it and then throw endless amounts of money at managing it, knowing there’s no cure.

And isn’t this the same NHS which last year spent £80million on paracetemol prescriptions and millions more on gastric band ops, sex change ops and breast reduction ops? And no, I absolutely don’t think the elderly should be allowed to go blind to find the money to pay for an Aids cure, as some people have suggested might happen.

It shouldn’t be an either/ or situation. What the NHS needs to do is spend its money more wisely.

And, as a report from the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges says, the health service wastes £2.3bn a year on “procedures and processes that could be done better, more cheaply or not at all”, it could start there!