Payment by Results for chemotherapy—challenges and solutions

Dear Colleagues

Establishing and effectively maintaining a tariff for chemotherapy, within our current financial restrictions, is going to be key in managing costs and ensuring prescription appropriateness in of one of the most costly areas of medicine.

In this month’s issue of Cancer Services Forum, Anne Hines modestly describes her tour through the highly complex and challenging process of defining this tariff as ‘merely a cursory look’. In essence, Anne provides an excellent overview of a long and drawn out project that many of us have only a partial understanding of. A process that has been beset with difficulties, including poor Trust data collection, inter and intra Trust prescribing variability and within a specialty that is constantly changing in response to research advances.

Also in this issue, Nicola Redfern provides a response to the discussion featured in Issue 13 on patient access schemes from an industry perspective. The challenges faced by the industry in being asked to offer these schemes appear to be every bit as challenging as those faced by the provider in administering them. Despite the ongoing work from the Patient Access Schemes Liaison Unit (PASLU), the burden of the schemes continues to increase, and the move towards encouraging less variability in the scheme models to reduce the administrative workload is not yet evident.

Libby Hardy
Lead Pharmacist, Peninsular Cancer Network

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