Current Petitions

The next petition is PE1108 by Tina McGeever. I thank her for her patience this afternoon and for travelling down quite a distance to Glasgow to contribute to the earlier part of our meeting. Her petition asks the Scottish Parliament to urge the Government to consider the provision of cancer treatment drugs, in particular cetuximab, on the national health service, to ensure equity across NHS boards in determining the appropriateness, effectiveness and availability of such treatments.In the year or so since the petition was lodged, we have explored many of the issues that it raises. We produced an independent report to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing that led to a parliamentary debate on the topic several months ago, but there are still some outstanding issues that we need to explore. Do members have any views on how we should take the petition forward?

The critical issue in the rest of the UK is that the Secretary of State for Health indicated that he wanted a review of co-funding arrangements. In our parliamentary debate, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing said that she would accept several of our recommendations but would come back to us on a number of issues. For the sake of consistency, I should say that the cabinet secretary indicated sympathy—

Yes, but she argued that she was troubled by the impact that co-funding might have on other people's right to access treatment. Some fundamental issues need to be explored.

I have some observations, but I will let John Wilson speak first.

The petitioner is fully aware that the matter has a series of implications because we are dealing with a big beast called the health service. There are complications in the way in which it interprets guidelines and guidance and the resources that are available to health boards.I will suggest what we might want to do in relation to the petition, and members can add to that if they wish. We raised a series of points in our committee report and asked the Government to respond to them. Its initial response, rightly, was to say that it was undertaking some work and that it would get information back by the end of January. In addition, it said that the better cancer care strategy should be part of the overall framework.The committee has discussed the fact that some of the initiatives will not require big resources but need just a different approach to patient liaison. I think that the petition was precipitated as much by the way in which the issue and the people who are involved in it are handled as by the difficulty of the issue itself. We could argue about whether certain drugs should be available on the NHS, and it is understandable that there are different ideological and philosophical positions on that, but the matter is fundamentally about how we care for people who have such traumatising experiences.We can liaise with the clerk about the series of questions that arise from our report, but I would welcome members' views on the areas to emphasise. That will help us to seek a clearer response from the Government and more information about its direction of travel on the petition.

That is a cue for the convener. I am happy to read it, unless you want to do so.

I will give the statement for the benefit of members of the public.As I said earlier, it is more than a year since we first considered the petition from Tina McGeever and her late husband Michael Gray, who started the process along with Tina but sadly lost his life in the interim period. The petition led to our inquiry and report, which set out 16 conclusions. We thought that those would be addressed in partnership with the Scottish Government through "Better Cancer Care, An Action Plan". Specifically, we wished to see how the conclusions of our report were addressed in the minister's deliberations.We recognise that the action plan addresses wider issues and not only those that were raised by the petition and our inquiry. We will continue to press the Scottish Government to put in place procedures, facilities and people that will improve the system for patients to access cancer drugs on the NHS. In his evidence, Michael Gray told us that he felt strongly that that was the right thing to do, rather than have a system in which people had to use personal savings or look to friends to make a contribution.Although the review of the guidance on NHS patients who receive private health care is welcome—ministers and the Parliament will determine their view on that in due course—we must remember that our inquiry highlighted other issues, such as the exceptional prescribing procedures, which were part of the process that the petitioner and her family underwent in their local NHS board, as well as communication and patient liaison.Our report states that some of the issues"can easily, readily and quickly be addressed with some imagination and commitment."We welcome the broad action that the Government has taken to date, but we wish to discover whether practical improvements have been put in place at the grass-roots level as a result of, for example, our support for the appointment of liaison officers in NHS board areas.To date, we have had no formal indication from health boards that they wish to appoint liaison officers, although we had assurances from individuals whom we interviewed as part of the inquiry that they would welcome such an initiative. The petitioner's local health board recognises that it needs to put in place better opportunities for that. We hope that we will get a clearer picture, and we await the outcome of the Government's consultation and of its "Better Cancer Care" plan. We hope that the Government will recognise the key recommendations that committee members took time to make.Do members have any final points?

Thanks—that was a long shift for me. The issue is important, and none of us, as parliamentarians, has had to deal with the dilemmas that Tina McGeever and her family have faced. Our recommendations could be of benefit in the long run, and we hope that they will be taken on board by those who make the final and formal decisions.I recommend that we keep the petition open until we explore the key issues that have been identified. I thank members for their patience; I also thank Tina McGeever for her patience in staying for the course of the meeting.