LADY ARCHER has backed demands for patients to be allowed to pay for additional medicines without losing their NHS care by releasing a survey showing that more than 80% of patients at the trust she chairs back the change.

The survey, of more than 800 patients, shows that 82% of NHS patients back the right to pay for top-up medicines.

The survey also found that more than 90% of doctors and nurses favour patients being allowed to pay supplements for proven cancer drugs which are not funded by the NHS.

Archer, chairwoman of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, has submitted the results to Mike Richards, the government’s cancer czar, who is conducting an inquiry into the scandal of withdrawing NHS treatment from patients who pay for private medicines.

Private drug helps cancer man left to die

Cancer patient sent home to die by the NHS sees health improve after cashing in pension and paying privately for drugs

• Banned cancer drugs better than NHS ones

• Doctors back top-up drugs

BACKGROUND

• Ministers rethink ban on private drugs in NHS

• ‘We’ve paid into the system all our lives. Why has the NHS turned on us?’

• Doctors' anger at cruelty to patients

• Cancer patients ‘betrayed’ by NHS

• Voters call for end to ban on private drugs

Dying cancer victim was forced to pay

Linda O’Boyle was denied free treatment in her final months because she had gone private to try to prolong her life

• Cancer victim told to pay for his own drugs by NHS

• Doctors for Reform fight NHS order to halt cancer care

• Fighting cancer and the ‘unjust’ health service

Related Links

• Top doctors slam NHS drug rationing

• Cost cannot be the only criterion for the NHS

• Swallow this and you’ll get a better NHS

In a letter to Richards, copied to Alan Johnson, the health secretary, Archer described the policy of penalising patients who choose to pay privately for drugs as “illogical and unjust”.

Archer, wife of Jeffrey Archer, the disgraced Tory peer and novelist, also said the co-payments should be allowed, not just for cancer medicines, but for all effective procedures and treatments which are not funded by the NHS.

Christoph Lees, a consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Cambridge NHS Trust, said the government should make “sensible provision for patients to exercise what should be their right, rather than penalise them for their choice”.

Meanwhile, nine professors of rheumatology at University College London Hospitals NHS Trust, in central London, and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust have claimed British arthritis patients are less likely to get the medicines they need than those in Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

In a letter to The Sunday Times, they accuse the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence of making a “senseless decision” by ruling that arthritis sufferers who are not successfully treated by one of a group of medicines known as anti-TNF treatments can’t switch to another type.

If you have been affected by NHS drug rationing, please e-mail health@sunday-times.co.uk

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