Dr. Michael McCarthy:

There has been incredible work by lots of good people in the NCP and the HSE to deliver access to new cancer drugs. I mentioned earlier there have been 125 new approvals for reimbursement for high-cost drugs since 2016 and that is very welcome. The challenge is the pace of change internationally, which is a good problem to have. There are more and more treatments coming out more quickly that are demonstrating effectiveness, that have evidence, are becoming European Medicines Agency, EMA, approved and are ending up in international expert consensus guidelines on how to treat cancer. The HSE is approving them at this rate through a lot of hard work by a lot of people. The rate of approval of new drugs is shooting past that. How do we capture that? How do we target our money? How do we get the drugs that work best to the patients who need them? These are the challenges.