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<p>Clinicians can already prescribe off-patent drugs off-label on clinical grounds
if they judge this is the right thing to do to meet the individual clinical needs
of their patients.</p><br /><p>The Government is keen to accelerate the adoption of
innovative medicines and increase the innovative use of existing medicines where the
evidence reports clinical benefits and cost effectiveness to patients. To that end,
we are seeking a number of initiatives to provide innovation but whilst supporting
the aims of the Private Member’s Bill on this subject, we do not believe the proposed
mechanism is either practicable and desirable.</p><br /><p>We are working with NHS
England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the General Medical
Council and the Medicines and Health products Regulatory Agency to ensure that there
is better information available to support clinicians who wish to prescribe off-patent
drugs for off-label indications, and to ensure that new evidence is picked up more
quickly and reliably and translated into clinical practice and can be fed through
into licensing applications.</p><br /><p>A huge amount of work is also going on in
the Accelerated Access Review which will support the “pull” of innovation through
to clinical practice.</p><br /><p>As part of the debate on the Access to Medical Treatments
Bill, we are working with officials in the Department, the Medicines and Healthcare
products Regulatory Agency, and the Health and Social Care Information Centre to see
how the power in the Bill, if it were to pass, could address the lack of provision
of information on new uses for existing medicines via the power to create a database
of innovations in order to support evidence-based prescribing.</p>
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