Orphan Diseases (Access to Therapy) (PE1398)
Pompe Disease (Access to Therapy) (PE1399)
Paroxysmal Nocturnal Haemoglobinuria (Access to Therapy) (PE1401)
Okay, folks, we have got back to our agenda. I see that our audience has been released for good behaviour, after listening all morning.
Item 4 is consideration of three petitions that relate to access to new medicines and medicines for rare conditions. As members can see from paper HS/S4/16/13/11, the petitions were central to the committee’s consideration of access to new medicines. As you will remember, the issues were discussed with the cabinet secretary at our meeting last week.
Members are aware that the system for accessing new medicines has been considerably changed. The changes have been broadly—indeed, extensively—welcomed, as we heard in evidence. Even if not everything is perfect, the system has certainly improved. You will recall that the Scottish Government is about to carry out a review of the changes to the medicines appraisal system, which I am sure that we all welcome. Given that all that work has been done, I ask the committee to consider whether to close PE1398, PE1399 and PE1401. I invite members’ views.
I think that it would be reasonable to say that the Government has indicated that it does not regard the review process as an end in itself. The Government acknowledges that, as technological and pharmaceutical advances are made and expectations evolve, processes in the Scottish Medicines Consortium must also evolve. Although there is yet another review, which will build on the improvements that have been made, I am content to close the petitions on the basis that the review will not be the end of the process and the issue will be work in progress as advances outstrip structures.
Do we agree to close the petitions on that basis?
Members indicated agreement.
Speech and Language Therapy (PE1384)
Item 5 is consideration of PE1384, from Kim Hartley, on behalf of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.
In paper HS/S4/16/13/10, members can see the timeline for the committee’s consideration, which includes the lodging of a Scottish Government amendment on voice equipment at stage 2 of the Health (Tobacco, Nicotine etc and Care) (Scotland) Bill, which was passed last week. Given the action that has been taken, we wrote to the petitioner to seek her view on whether we should close the petition, and members have a copy of her response. I invite members’ views. Should we close the petition? Are there issues that we should include in our legacy paper?
I agree that we should close the petition. Kim Hartley Kean—as she now is—has put a huge amount of effort into the petition and into speech and language therapy in general. I note that in her letter she suggests that we recommend to a future health committee that it consider conducting an inquiry into the state of and demand for allied health professional services. That is an issue that this committee has not looked at closely, and such work probably needs to be done.
I hear that.
I was going to express a similar view. Kim Hartley Kean accepts that the petition should be closed but expresses a level of dissatisfaction about the lack of progress on some of the issues during this parliamentary session. I have been on this committee for only six months, so I do not know the detail of what it has been doing, but perhaps AHP services in general, and speech and language therapy in particular, need a bit more attention in the next session. We could mention that in our legacy paper.
We can draw our successor committee’s attention to the issue in the legacy paper. We are not in a position to set the new committee’s work programme, but there is no harm in mentioning the issue. If we had had more time, we might have done more on the issue. We might have had a meeting on it, for example, but we were not able to do so.
I declare an interest: I am convener of the cross-party group on heart disease and stroke, and Kim Hartley Kean is a representative on that cross-party group. She is also part of a sub-group of the CPG. We should suggest in our legacy paper that there is a piece of work to be done on AHPs, given that we are moving towards integration of health and social care and there will be a greater role for AHPs in the community, which is to be welcomed.
It is very good to put the issue in that context.
I will not prevent other members from commenting if they want to do so, but there seems to be a consensus in the committee that, although we can close the petition, we should include some of Kim Hartley Kean’s comments in our legacy paper and highlight that, if we had had more time, we would have looked at the role of AHPs in developing the workforce for integrated care. That is not something that we have spent much time on. Do members agree to proceed on that basis?
Members indicated agreement.
Thank you. That ends the public part of the meeting and we move into private to consider our legacy paper.
11:51 Meeting continued in private until 12:06.Previous
Subordinate Legislation