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NHS Patients (Access to Medicines)

I welcome the hon. Gentleman's remarks, and I, too, pay tribute to Brian O'Boyle. The hon. Gentleman eloquently described that case of a woman who had spent her whole life in the NHS being charged for the cost of her treatment or having that treatment withdrawn, and any politician who came across the case would have felt that if there had not previously been the time to review the guidance, the time had certainly come now. The hon. Gentleman raised an important question—which the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for North Norfolk, also raised, but which I did not get around to addressing in my reply to him. Professor Richards says in his report that there may be circumstances in which one would need to give such care to a patient in an NHS environment for clinical safety reasons; he expects such situations to arise very rarely, but they may do so because patient safety comes first. In terms of where patients would have to go, there is currently no difference: they would have to access the medicine from the private sector. What we are saying in the report, as one of Mike Richards' recommendations, is that strategic health authorities should look at this, to make sure that patients know exactly where they need to go to access the drugs in a private setting—it may be in an NHS hospital, a private clinic or at home. Professor Richards and his colleagues think this is entirely appropriate, and that it will work well and will not cause any concerns, and it is certainly far better than the current system in which, as the hon. Member for Billericay pointed out, the cruelty of withdrawing such treatment is beyond anything we in this House would want to cause.