CANCER patients in Britain are less likely to be treated with the latest medicines than those in almost any other European country, except for former communist states such as the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

The lack of availability affects treatments including Herceptin, the breast cancer “wonder drug”.

The shortage of new drugs is caused by tight financial controls and delays in approving medicines, says a report by the authoritative Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. It claims that Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice) is “unable to cope” with the task of approving drugs, some of which take more than a year to enter use.

“The UK lags behind other EU countries in terms of the ability of cancer patients to access new cancer drugs,” says the research by Nils Wilking, an oncologist at the Karolinska, and Bengt Jonsson, an economist at the Stockholm School of Economics.

“The Czech Republic, Hungary, Norway, Poland and the UK were consistently identified as below average adopters of new cancer drugs.”

Professor Karol Sikora, consultant oncologist at the Hammersmith hospital, London, said the failings meant British patients needed to pay to receive the best medicines. “It is very sad that despite spending billions trying to improve cancer services we are still at the bottom of the league.

“We have a burgeoning bureaucracy with much growing inequity and persistent hidden rationing. The well off and the better educated simply get better care.”

The report, which will be presented to the European parliament this week, shows that survival from cancer is directly linked to access to the best medicines.

It finds that the lack of availability of drugs is the primary reason why cancer survival rates in Britain are relatively poor despite the government’s £2 billion cancer care plan.

Only 67% of patients survive one year after diagnosis in Britain compared with 81% in France and 73% in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Survival rates five years after cancer is detected are at 48% in Britain compared with 61% in France and 54% cent in Bosnia.

In addition to the shortage of Herceptin, Britain performs well below the European average for access to the new lung cancer drugs gemcitabine and vinorelbine. British patients dying from lung cancer would be more likely to be treated with gemcitabine if they lived in Greece, Hungary or the Czech Republic.

In addition, bowel cancer patients are less likely to be prescribed the new medicines oxaliplatin and irinotecan. A smaller proportion of British patients receive irinotecan than do sufferers in Hungary or the Czech Republic.

The report directly blames Nice for the failure to make cancer medicines available to British patients.

Once drugs are approved by the central EU regulatory body, the committee for medicinal products for human use, they should be available nationally within 180 days.

But the study found that it can take 18 months from European approval until a medicine is even considered by Nice. Its review can then take an additional 14 months.

The report finds: “There is an issue with the capacity of Nice to undertake such reviews in a timely fashion.”

A recent Audit Commission report also found that, even when Nice recommends medicines and the government promises they will be available, the drugs are denied to thousands of patients by local NHS managers.

Andrew Dillon, chief executive of Nice, said his institute was planning to speed up evaluation of new cancer drugs.

“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,” he said.

“We have responded by proposing a new streamlined process for drugs, and we think these proposals can make a real difference.”

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