New drug costs threaten NHS financial stability, says report 21 Jun 2023

The new report, ‘Promoting population health through pharmaceutical policy: The role of the UK Voluntary Scheme’, produced by researchers at the London School of Economics, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and University of York, investigates the costs of prescription medicines to the NHS in England. It finds that this bill reached a new high of £17.2 billion in 2021-2022 and that relatively few medicines drove that growth between 2018 and 2022.  

 The report states that many new medicines are too expensive for the benefits they offer to patients, even after accounting for any potential cost savings. 

One of the report’s authors, Dr Aris Angelis, Assistant Professor of Health Economics at LSHTM, suggested that the current negotiations between the UK government and the pharma industry on the next iteration of the Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing and Access (VPAS) should “ensure that spending on medicines is proportionate, to prevent resources from being diverted away from other vital services in the NHS”. 

 Another of the authors, Beth Woods, Senior Research Fellow at the University of York, added that the pharma industry was “getting too big a slice of the pie”, when NHS budgets were tight. “Incentivising the development of new medicines is important, but the right balance needs to be struck given other NHS priorities,” she commented.