New drug costs €250,000 a year for five patients

A new chemotherapeutic drug just made available on the NHS was costing €250,000 a year to give to five patients, Social Policy Minister John Dalli said yesterday.

This was just one of about 100 new medicines the government had been asked to start giving for free, he said, adding that introducing new drugs required a lengthy process.

He was making the point about the high cost of introducing new medicines and pointed out that some medications cost a staggering €4,000 for every shot.

"We can double national insurance to give everyone what they want but do we want to do that," he asked, quickly adding that this was not on the books even though he has been hinting at the need for such change for some time now.

Mr Dalli highlighted the need to reform the Government Pharmaceutical Services and stop buying medicines through three-year contracts because prices were likely to go down over that time period.

Speaking during the presentation of his ministry's first year in office, Mr Dalli said the authorities had embarked on a projection of health needs in the coming 10 years to find solutions for looming problems.

"We cannot face the same problems we had at Mater Dei Hospital this winter," he said in reference to the shortage of bed space due to an increase in elderly patients admitted to hospital because of lack of beds elsewhere.

Referring to waiting lists for operations, Mr Dalli said that in the coming days the first centralised list for orthopaedics statistics would be launched.

Last June, Mr Dalli's ministry had said it was working on a single data-gathering system at Mater Dei, which would increase efficiency. Yesterday, he said the centralised data needed to be accompanied by solutions on how to reduce waiting time to undergo surgery.

He expressed hope that by the end of the year there would be a programme in place which gave a specific maximum time a patient would have to wait for surgery.

He said Mater Dei's performance was "way ahead" that of St Luke's Hospital and, despite complaints, improved housekeeping services meant that patients preferred it over private hospitals.

However, he admitted that it was still not known what would happen to the Guardamangia premises that housed the old hospital.

Mr Dalli said radical changes were needed in collective agreements to make the hospital more efficient and expressed the hope that unions would be reasonable. "We need to remove the practice that overtime is a guarantee.

This will be stopped," he said.