Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment has the Government made of the effectiveness of the processes for evaluating Covid-19 treatment drugs.

As we move out of the pandemic response, it is right that existing processes for understanding the clinical and cost-effectiveness of medicines are used to inform routine commissioning arrangements, including for new COVID-19 drugs and treatments. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is the independent, expert body that develops authoritative, evidence-based recommendations for the National Health Service on whether new medicines represent a clinically and cost-effective use of resources.

To support the transition to routine commissioning, NICE has been evaluating the clinical and cost effectiveness of the licensed treatments for COVID-19 and published final guidance on 29 March that recommends three medicines as options for treating COVID-19 in adults which will be made routinely available to NHS patients in line with NICE’s recommendations. Because new COVID-19 variants develop over time, NICE is also introducing a new review process to update its recommendations on the clinical and cost-effectiveness of COVID-19 treatments so they can be made available more quickly to patients, if they show promise against new variants and are found to be cost-effective.