Roche Products (New Zealand) General Manager Alex Muelhaupt today congratulated the Pharmac External Review Committee and the Government for their courage in identifying shortcomings in Pharmac’s operations and their intention to improve them, particularly in regard to equity of health outcomes for Māori and Pasifika.

He said a medicines crisis was evidenced by the Committee’s Report, the growing number of medicines on the Options For Investment List, the recent analysis by Te Aho o Te Kahu - Cancer Control Agency that identified gaps in funding of cancer treatments, as well as estimates that suggest that New Zealanders have some of the poorest access to funded modern medicines out of the OECD nations.[1]

“We need a generational change in medicines funding for New Zealanders, which means fairer and more accurate assessment of the benefits of medicines.

“The Review and Government response are an important first step in creating better, more equitable access to life-saving medicines for our whānau, friends, and community. But right now, when a particular medicine is assessed for funding, the benefit to patients is overshadowed by a constrained budget environment. Assessments of the value of medicines in New Zealand don’t take into account benefits such as keeping people in employment. The assessments are also not transparent as they’re not available for peer-review by patient groups to allow for important errors to be addressed.

“The medicines crisis has been created by narrow assessments of the value of medicines and underestimation of the budget needed to fund the first world medicines portfolio that’s required to keep New Zealanders alive, healthy and thriving.

“At Roche we very much recognise that we need to play our part in ensuring sustainable, equitable access to our innovative medicines for patients, and will continue to work with the New Zealand Government, its agencies and the health sector as a partner to ‘do now what patients need next’.”

[1] https://www.medicinesnz.co.nz/fileadmin/user_upload/IQVIA_ICOMM_Report__August_2019___1_.pdf

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