Cancer drugs fund, Winter flu vaccine, Bandy legs and knock knees, Peer review

Inside Health

BBC

Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 575 Ratings

🗓️ 22 September 2015

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For five years the Cancer Drugs Fund has supplied seventy five thousand patients in England with cancer drugs, but its days are numbered. Spiralling costs have led to a reduction in the number of drugs the CDF will pay for, meaning newly-diagnosed patients may miss out. Dr Mark Porter talks to Vicky Rockingham about the anxiety that reform of the CDF is causing. Vicky is a mother of two, working full time, and receiving regorafenib paid for by the CDF for her rare type of gastrointestinal stromal tumour, or GIST. She tells Mark that the drugs from the CDF are giving her extra time with her family and enabling her to carry on working. And Jonathan Pearce, Chair of Cancer 52, an alliance of organisations that represent people with less common and rarer cancers like Vicky's, tells Mark why any new-model CDF must take into account individual patient needs. Regular Inside Health contributor, Dr Margaret McCartney, describes how patients access cancer drugs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and discusses with Mark the difficult decisions that access to expensive and innovative new cancer medicines present for the NHS.

Last season's winter flu vaccine provided only limited protection to those who received it. An exceptional year where there was a mismatch between the flu virus that eventually circulated, and the vaccine that had been developed by international teams. The result was just 30% protection (down from its usual 70-80%). Dr Mark Porter asks the chair of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), Professor Andrew Pollard, whether confidence in this year's vaccine could be dented.

Babies, toddlers and pre-school children often seem to have bow legs and knock-knees and parents frequently turn up at their doctor's surgery asking for reassurance about the way their children walk. Manoj Ramachandran, consultant children's orthopaedic and trauma surgeon based at The Royal London and Bart's Hospital tells Mark that up to a quarter of the children referred to his clinics have normal, developmental lower limb variants. Children are naturally bow legged when they first walk and by the age of three, there's another natural re-alignment which tends to lead to knock knees. At both these ages his clinic receives a peak in referrals but by the age of seven, he says, most childrens' legs straighten up naturally.

Inside Language: Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford and Dr Margaret McCartney continue to demystify the scientific language of medicine. This week, peer review.

Producer: Fiona Hill.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Rihalina. I'm excited. You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello, thank you for listening to this edition of Inside Health. I hope you enjoy it. Coming up today, flu jabs. Last year's vaccine didn't work that well, so is this year going to be any better?
0:44.5	Peer review, nothing to do with the upper chamber, but a key process in the publication of new research.
0:50.9	But what does it actually mean? Margaret McCartney and Carl Hennigan
0:54.4	continue their series demystifying the scientific language of medicine and our guide to
0:59.7	knock knees and bandy legs. What's normal and what's not. Pretty much all children are born
1:05.5	slightly bow-leg and the worst of the sort of bow-leg appearance is around the age of 18 months.
1:11.9	Then the next thing that happens is by the age of three to five years old,
1:16.6	the knee undergoes a sort of normal change in morphology and becomes knock-kneed.
1:21.5	Then we get a spate of referrals that are more to do with knock-knees.
1:24.9	More from that children's orthopaedic surgeon later. But first,
1:29.2	controversial changes to the way the NHS funds some cancer treatments, changes that could
1:34.9	mean an increasing number of patients will be denied access to the latest therapies. Five years ago,
1:41.0	media coverage about cancer invariably centred on reports that many people
1:45.1	were missing out on expensive new drugs that could extend their lives, albeit often not by very
1:51.6	much. The Cancer Drugs Fund was introduced in 2011 in England to address those concerns. It
1:57.7	enables doctors to apply for special funding to offer individual patients new drugs
2:02.1	that haven't been approved by nice and would not normally be available on the NHS. But the
2:07.3	CDF has been a victim of its own success and demand has blown the budget with an overspend of
2:12.9	nearly 140 million pounds this year alone. As a result, the number of drugs a CDF will pay for has
2:19.2	been cut and the whole scheme is being phased out in March next year and it's still unclear
2:24.0	what will replace it. Vicki Rockingham was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in her stomach,
2:30.2	a gastrointestinal stromal tumour or gist in 2007. At the time of diagnosis there wasn't
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