Terminally ill Brits deserve more access to experimental treatments
For a country that prides itself on its individualism and a cheeky relationship with the rules, we’re amazingly keen on rigid adherence to red tape when it comes to healthcare and medicine. This is good and bad. Good that it enshrines a standard of care and ensures prescribed drugs are safe. Bad that when it comes to keeping potentially life-prolonging treatments from desperately ill patients with little to lose, some inevitably miss out.
This might at last be changing. The Government has accepted recommendations made in a report by Lord O’Shaughnessy to improve commercial clinical trials and reduce the delays involved. Most promisingly, plans are now afoot to offer GPs financial incentives to recruit patients into trials, and hospitals could be given research targets. Great. It’s time we took advantage of our single, population-wide health service.
But we should go further. Let’s think more like the Americans when it comes to accessing last-ditch treatments.
The US Right to Try law, introduced federally under Donald Trump, is one of the rare good things to come out of that presidency. It seems humane and smart, allowing terminally ill patients to bypass the regulator completely in search of new medicines. It’s for those who have “exhausted all approved treatment options and are unable to participate in a clinical trial to access certain drugs that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration”.
You can see how this would give hope to those who are extremely sick, and potentially save lives. Perhaps now that we’re peeling back the layers of stultifying regulatory culture in our medical and research pipeline, we should seize the moment and run with it. A British Right to Try for our terminally ill, who deserve nothing less.