Proposals to reform the way the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) appraises new medicines could represent a step back rather than forward for cancer patients, a leading charity has warned.

NICE’s value-based assessment proposals would remove the rules that ensure that treatments used near the end of patients’ lives are given special consideration – but the end-of-life criteria are the only reason why 12 life-extending cancer drugs have been approved by NICE, says the Rarer Cancers Foundation (RCF).

Without these, there is no guarantee that similar treatments would be approved in the future, the group warns, pointing out that “the Department of Health’s own figures show that up to 12,841 patients a year would have been denied the opportunity of treatment had the end-of-life criteria not been in place.”

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