Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what criteria the NHS uses to decide whether a child with epilepsy can access a prescription for cannabis medication.

Whether to prescribe any medicine is a clinical decision.

The licensed cannabis-based medicine Epidyolex is prescribed and routinely funded on the National Health Service (NHS) for Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (two forms of epilepsy).

However, the latest National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines demonstrate a clear need for more evidence to support routine prescribing and funding decisions for unlicensed cannabis-based products on the NHS.

If an NHS clinician wishes to prescribe these unlicensed products an individual funding request can be made based on whether there is evidence of exceptionality to justify funding the treatment. A request is made for an individual patient whose clinical circumstances are clearly different to other patients with the same condition, and there is a reason why the individual patient would respond differently to other patients and therefore gain more clinical benefit from the proposed treatment.