A WOMAN suffering from breast cancer has run out of time to benefit from a potentially life-extending drug which the National Health Service (NHS) denied her, even though she was prepared to pay for it.

Colette Mills has been told by doctors that in the four months since she asked for the drug the disease has taken such a hold in her body that the cancer will no longer respond to the treatment.

She is the victim of a ruling which states that any patient who wants to pay for additional drugs not prescribed by the NHS should lose their entitlement to their basic NHS cancer care and pay for all their treatment. She was prepared to pay for the drug but not her whole treatment.

Mills, a 58-year-old former nurse, said: “I am just absolutely gutted. I just cannot believe people make these decisions about other people’s lives.

“It wasn’t going to cost them. I was going to pay for it. How can they say this policy is far more important than somebody’s life?

“The NHS has taken this opportunity away from me and, if they are doing it to me, they are doing it to a lot of other women as well.”

The government claims that to allow some patients to pay for additional drugs on top of their NHS treatment creates a two-tier system between those who can and cannot afford them.

Asked about her future prospects, Mills said: “They are not hopeful of halting it. They will give you no promises. I didn’t ask and he [the doctor] didn’t say. It is not something I want to know just yet.”

Mills, a mother of two, launched a legal action to try to force the NHS to allow her to pay for the drug Avastin which she wanted to take alongside another medicine, Taxol, which is prescribed by the health service.

But during her four-month battle with the NHS, the breast cancer has spread to other parts of her body and doctors have told Mills it is too late for her to benefit from the combination of Avastin and Taxol.

An American trial has shown that taking the drugs in combination doubles the chance of preventing the disease from spreading compared to taking Taxol on its own. Taking Avastin in addition to Taxol is also likely to keep the disease under control for almost twice as long. Leading oncologists say Avastin offers a small but significant advantage in treating breast cancer.

Mills will now be prescribed an alternative medicine but does not know how successful this will be in stopping the cancer.

Several other cancer patients are also taking legal action to win the right to pay for medicines that are not available on the NHS. The patients’ lawyer, Melissa Worth, of the law firm Halliwells, said: “Colette has been told by her medical team that she may have missed her chance. If she had been given the opportunity to take the Avastin when she first contacted her medical team about it, then she would have had three months’ treatment by now. Months down the line, the policy will need to change but for those patients currently fighting their NHS trusts, it might be too late.”

Becoming an entirely private patient would have cost Mills, from near Stokesley, North Yorkshire, about £10,000 a month instead of about £4,000 solely to pay for the Avastin and its administration. Although she could have tried to raise the funds such as finding a loan, she believes it is a fundamental principle that the NHS should continue to fund her basic care for which she has paid through her taxes.

The Department of Health, however, said top-up payments would “undermine” the “fundamental principle of the NHS, now supported by all the main political parties, that treatment should be free at the point of need”.

Mills’s case has provoked a national debate about whether NHS patients should be allowed to pay for top-up treatments.

NHS chief executives, the Patients Association, Doctors for Reform and Saga, the organisation for the over-fifties, have all backed Mills and other patients in her situation since The Sunday Times highlighted their plight last year.

A group of Conservative MPs, including former shadow health minister John Baron, are campaigning for co-payments to be allowed.

Explore Health News

• Swine flu

Times Recommends

• Please help: maimed children of war want their lives back
• Unlocking the cruellest prison
• Prince Charles named in £81m court battle