We welcome the announcement from Pharmac on their appointment of their new Consumer and Patient Working group, that will be helping Pharmac in their ‘reset’ programme over the next 12 month to be more transparent and focused on the needs of consumers.
This group is chaired by Dr Malcolm Mulholland (co-founder of Patient Voice Aotearoa) and co-chaired by Rachel Smalley (The Medicine Gap), who have extensive experience in advocating for improved access to medications and health services, as have the other eight members of this group.
We also want to acknowledge the progress Pharmac has made in responding to the recommendations of the review of Pharmac in 2022. We’re particularly interested in progress on a more transparent structure when medications on the Options for Investment list are prioritised (currently done within a Pharmac staff meeting, but without formal input from specialist advisory committees or consumers).
We’re also interested in hearing how Pharmac is progressing the directive from the Minister for Pharmac to update its assessment methodologies to consider the societal impacts of funding medicines and medical devices, as outlined in the latest letter of expectations. The societal impact of migraine is enormous, from lost work productivity and impact of migraine on quality of life and ability to engage in life activities.
We have great concern that although Pharmac was invited to make two formal Budget bids in 2025, to increase the medicines budget and increase Pharmac’s operating budget, which would have supported a programme to look at societal impacts, these were declined by the Government.
We know that investing in medicines will have a positive impact on health and wellbeing as well as the economy, and can only request that this investment is more carefully considered and given a higher priority. We are so far behind other countries in terms of having access to modern medicines.
The Budget documents revealed that it would take an average of $239 million per year for 4 years to fund 50 medicines on the Options for Investment list, the list of medicines that have been through Pharmac’s approval process but Pharmac cannot afford to fund. Three migraine preventive medications – Emgality, Aquipta and Aimovig sit on this list. This sounds like an excellent use of money.
Acting Pharmac CEO, Brendan Boyle, has met regularly with advocacy groups in the last year and we look forward to continued engagement with the new Pharmac CEO, Natalie McMurty, when she joins the organisation on 15 September. We wholeheartedly support Pharmac to continue to bid for an appropriate level of funding, to cover the medicines currently languishing on the Options for Investment list and improve Pharmac’s processes of assessing medicines and engaging with consumers.
