ANY drug that could improve life expectancy will be assessed and made available to patients within six months of being licensed under a new system proposed by the Government’s treatment watchdog.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which advises the NHS on best practice, plans to speed up the introduction of important treatments in an appraisal programme designed to end delays.

The Government and NICE have been criticised recently over delays in appraising many treatments of proven benefit.

This week The Times revealed that NICE guidance is still pending for 23 cancer drugs. The drugs, listed in a report by the charity Cancer, BACUP, are all licensed for use in Britain, but none is widely available because NICE has yet to issue its recommendations to the NHS. The treatment watchdog said yesterday that it was in talks with the Department of Health over its proposals, which, in some cases, would mean that guidance is issued shortly after a drug becomes available.

CancerBACUP’s report said that cancer patients in the UK were waiting more than two years for some treatments and in many cases the treatments would not be available in time to help them because of delays in NICE guidance.

Once a drug has been licensed, doctors are able to prescribe it to patients regardless of whether NICE has issued guidance on it; but drugs usually become much more widely available in the NHS once the treatment watchdog has given its advice.

Medications stuck in the appraisal pipeline include drugs for cancers of the breast, colon, bone marrow, lung, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and brain tumours. They include Arimidex, a medication for early-stage breast cancer in post-menopausal women that has been shown to be 25 per cent more effective than the most commonly used “best-practice” treatment, tamoxifen. Last week the Scottish Medicines Consortium recommended that the drug be used in Scotland, but guidance for England and Wales is not expected until November 2006.

On Wednesday the NICE board met to consider proposals for the more rapid development of advice to the NHS on important new drugs and health technologies. The proposals have now been submitted to the Department of Health for discussions before a decision on them is adopted.

NICE said it was very conscious of its role in ensuring that the NHS had “timely, good-quality guidance” when a new medicine was licensed for UK use. Andrew Dillon, the chief executive, said: “We have listened to what patients and healthcare professionals have told us about the need for timely advice on the use of new medicines, particularly for life-threatening conditions such as cancer.

“We have responded by proposing a new, streamlined process for single drugs.”

A Department of Health spokesman said: “We raised with NICE the need to develop proposals for the more rapid publication of advice to the NHS on the most important new drugs and welcome their recognition of the urgency required.

“However, it is vital that we properly assess what the full impact of NICE’s proposals might be, for both patients and the NHS.

“To that end, the Department of Health will be discussing NICE’s proposals with the institute over the coming days before a decision is taken on the best way forward.

“We fully appreciate the importance of this issue and ministers have asked that discussions be completed within weeks.”

On Thursday women fighting for wider access to the drug Herceptin in women with early breast cancer marched on Parliament and met Rosie Winterton, the Health Minister.

The campaign group Fighting for Herceptin claim that as many as 2,000 women may be dying in the UK each year because they are denied access to the drug; but Roche, the makers, have yet to apply for a licence for Herceptin to be used in early breast cancer cases. This application is expected to be put in early next year.

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