News about new pharmaceuticals and therapies helping to fight diseases that are difficult or even hopeless for modern medicine regularly appear in the media. However, the enthusiasm quickly wears off when we realize that most of them will remain beyond the reach of the Polish patient. Despite the constant expansion of the reimbursement list, the National Health Fund still does not keep up with the progress of medicine.
Recent decades have brought a breakthrough in the treatment of many chronic, rare or previously incurable diseases. New drugs not only extend our lifebut also effective increase its quality. How important they are is shown by statistics – it is estimated that thanks to innovations in pharmacotherapy, life expectancy increased by as much as 40-59 percent.
Introducing a new drug to the market is usually preceded by an EU registration procedure. Only then are individual member states admitted to trading, and at a different pace. According to IQVIA, in Poland, the average time from consent to trade in a drug to the first sale is over a yearwhich places us in the middle of the ranking of European Union countries – behind Norway, Ireland or the Netherlands, but ahead of countries such as Spain or the Czech Republic. For comparison, in the USA this period is less than three months.
While the marketing procedure itself is not the longest, the availability of innovative drugs remains very limited in our country. The report “Breakthrough pharmaceutical innovations” states that public spending on health care in relation to GDP places Poland in one of the last places in Europe (4,6% in 2017). The current list of reimbursed drugs in the field of neoplastic diseases shows how much this affects the treatment. Analyzing the topic, Alivia indicates that after the recent changes in the NHF drug programs (which are still mainly due to the involvement and pressure of the patients themselves), the “oncoindex” (an indicator measuring the level of access to oncological therapies) is -70. Translating this into specific therapies, it turns out that 47 out of 102 recommended by the European Society of Clinical Oncology is not available for Polish patients at all, and the next 37 treatments are reimbursed, but with serious limitations.
The material was created as part of the nationwide educational campaign «Breakthrough therapies. The key to the development of medicine », which was launched on September 13 in the press, as a special thematic supplement in« Gazeta Wyborcza », online at wpunktozdrowiu.pl and many portals dealing with family and health topics. You can read all the texts here.