LONDON, July 12 (Reuters) - Britain is working on new ways to ensure medicines used by the state health service offer value for money but will not change the system before the current five-year deal with drugs companies expires at the end of 2013.
Health minister Andrew Lansley told reporters on Monday he did not intend to rush through the shift by ripping up the existing Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme (PPRS).
A proposal in May by the new coalition government to move to "value-based pricing" triggered concerns over future drug sales in the country, since it may lead to the sort of price controls seen elsewhere in Europe.
Presenting a government white paper in the future of the health service, Lansley said he wanted drug companies to be paid according to the value of new medicines in order to promote innovation and improve value for money.
However, the introduction of this value-based approach for drugs used on the state-funded National Health Service (NHS) will not happen until 2013/14.
"It says that (date) because the pharmaceutical price regulation scheme, the current PPRS, expires at the end of December 2013. So to that extent I have made it clear that we are not going to introduce value-based pricing by way of abrogating the existing PPRS," he told reporters.
"But there will be substantial opportunities for us to achieve more of what value-based pricing will achieve in the long term through use of patient access schemes under the existing PPRS."
The current PPRS regulates profits, not individual product prices, on sales to the NHS, while the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) assesses if drugs are cost effective and should be reimbursed on the state system.
NICE can take into account so-called patient access schemes, under which companies offer special deals on certain medicines, when assessing if a particular product is worth using.
As an interim measure, Lansley said the government was creating a new Cancer Drugs Fund, which will operate from April 2011, to help patients to get cancer drugs recommended by their doctors.
Creating the cancer fund was a manifesto promise from the Conservative Party designed to help patients get access to pricey cancer drugs not approved by NICE. (Reporting by Tim Castle; writing by Ben Hirschler).
