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A total of £1.27bn (â,¬1.7bn; $1.9bn) has so far been spent on the Cancer Drugs Fund in England, but no data exist to show whether it has been spent wisely, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee says in a new report. 1
Despite the Department of Health noting when the fund was set up in 2010 that it was important to collect clinical outcomes from the drugs it pays for, few data exist. The department encouraged NHS trusts to collect data but did not require them to do so. When NHS England took over the fund in April 2014 it made data collection mandatory, but the committee still found gaps for 2014-15, with 93% of records having no summary of outcomes.
The health department and NHS England "have not managed the fund effectively" the report concluded.
The committee's chair, Meg Hillier, Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, said, "The Cancer Drugs Fund has enabled thousands of people to receive drugs not normally available to them through the NHS. While...