Lorcan Nyhan

Look, it's just such a desperately sad story, desperately sad interview.

How could you not want, even if it's a small increase in the quality of life of a son and even if it's a small chance of that increase, whatever you think of it, how would you not want that to happen?

You have to look at the system as well, that it can't always just be down to the strength of the advocacy, the strength of the anecdotal evidence that comes forward.

You have to look at the system.

And when you look at the Irish system for this, we quite obviously over-index on cost-effectiveness and under-index on actually approving the drugs and the ability to get the quality of life.

I mean, if we look at how we approve the cancer drugs in Ireland, it's quite obvious now oncologists have been telling us for quite some time that we have a very low access to the newest cancer drug.

And there have been reports that we have the lowest rates of approval in Western Europe.

So that when it comes to the new cancer drugs over the last number of years, there's been maybe 56 new EMA approved cancer drugs.

And we've only approved a quarter of those.

Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, France, Iceland, Ireland.

approve more than we do.

So either they're all getting it wrong or we're getting it wrong when it comes to the approval.

So you actually have to look at the cost effectiveness of it.

But we appear to be over-indexing just on the value because, look, and I don't blame the department of the HSE or the department within the HSE that's doing this because they're obviously, they're doing the best job they can in the metrics they're given.

And therefore, I think we need a shift in the government approach to this, which is saying, yes, we need to look for value, but that's not the only thing we need to be looking at.

And if we are a relatively wealthy country and if we are a country that has to make decisions on where we spend our money, maybe we should say, look,

even if it is a balance of saying, look, we might be overpaying a bit or we're not 100% sure of the efficacy of this or look, maybe one in two of these drugs will fall through.

Let's go to the European average and let's just take the risk of funding this because it could have a big impact.

So we're slow to approve them in the first place.

We take about two years, which is too long.