Helping improve patient outcomes and access to new medicines

CDF allows for promising new cancer drugs to be made available to patients before they are fully approved for use in the NHS. These specialised agreements focus on keeping spend within the CDF budget and providing the evidence collection and data sharing arrangements necessary to assess if the drug can be moved into routine commissioning.

If the budget impact of a new drug exceeds NICE's threshold of £20 million, in any of the first three years, NHS England may engage in commercial discussions with the company. These discussions are designed to mitigate the impact that funding the technology would have on the rest of the NHS.

CPAG assesses drugs, medical devices and treatments according to their clinical effectiveness, benefit for patients and value for money. We provide advice to NHS England about the commissioning of recommended services where they are likely to have a major budgetary impact.

HST are recommendations by NICE on the use of new and existing highly specialised medicines and treatments within the NHS in England. These medicines are often very high cost, low volume treatments where NHS England needs to enter into confidential commercial arrangements with the company in order to be able to make the treatments available to patients whilst delivering value for money to the NHS.

Our team have been advising on this new scheme which allows NHS England to offer more innovative commercial solutions to companies to enable new high cost drugs to be offered to more patients whilst delivering better value for money for the NHS and the taxpayer.