The head of the agency responsible for assessing the effectiveness and value of new medicines for the HSE has said there needs to be greater use of low-cost drugs like generics and biosimilars to create the financial space for funding new medicines.
Professor Michael Barry, Director of the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics (NCPE), said that with no ringfenced funding for new drugs next year there will be delays in patient access to new medicines.
But he said that savings can be made on the €3.2bn spend on drugs here each year, which can help fund new medicines.
Prof Barry told a NCPE conference in Dublin that the pharmaceutical industry must do better in its pricing.
He said there was not enough debate about what health outcomes the country is getting for new expensive medicines.
Just because a drug is deemed cost-effective does not mean it will be used in a cost-effective way, he added.
Prof Barry said the question has to be posed as to whether Ireland could be and should be spending the money elsewhere.
He said that health technology assessments by the NCPE will save almost €400m over five years.
The conference heard that the rising drugs bill is being driven by new innovations, more expensive drugs, an ageing population and doctors prescribing more.
A hundred drug assessments were done by the NCPE last year and 75 so far this year.
Prof Barry said that so far there have been 6,700 applications for a new weight loss drug with 51% of applications approved having met the prescribing criteria.
He told the conference that the estimate had been that there would be 150 applications.
Confident on dedicated funding for new medicines -Taoiseach
The Taoiseach said that he "is confident that we will be able to provide dedicated funding for new medicines in the (HSE) service plan for 2024".
Speaking in the Dáil this afternoon, Leo Varadkar said that "in most years, we allocate maybe €20m or €30m as part of a dedicated fund for new medicines".
"The budget for medicines is €3.2bn a year" and " even savings of 1% would free up €32m for new medicines".
"I believe they can be found, and that's the work that needs to be done so that we can have a dedicated fund for new medicines which I think we all agree we need," he said.
In the last three years, €100m has been spent on new medicines including €18m this year for 17 new drugs.
Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly said he has met the sector including the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA) on the issue of new drugs.
The Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association has said that the budget decision over access to new medicines appears to mean that the availability of new medicines depends on other new savings being realised by the HSE over and above the savings being delivered by IPHA members.
The IPHA said that this is not a good basis to plan for new treatments and will lead to delays, uncertainty and backlogs, as before.
