This week we talked about our cheaper medicines reforms, which are making medicines more affordable for Australians, and you all know why.
When we came to Government we were told by the ABS that about a million Australians every year were going without scripts that their doctor had said were important for their health because of cost.
A wave of cheaper medicine reforms, cutting the general patient co-payment, cutting the safety net threshold for pensioners, and introducing 60-day scripts for common medicines used for chronic and ongoing disease has really transformed the experience of so many patients when they go to their pharmacy counter.
I thank the industry for your engagement, it is making a real difference. Not only saving people money, which is good for their hip pocket, but importantly, allowing them to fill more of the scripts for them or for their kids, and for other family members that their doctor has said is important.
A subcategory of that is women's health, and I'll talk a bit about that in the context of HTA reform.
Today, so many of the 57 percent of the women Labor caucus who got together to celebrate Women's Health Week. We provided a bit of an update report on the women's health package that we delivered in February this year before the last election.
A centrepiece of that was around medicines. There had not been a new oral contraceptive pill listed on the PBS for more than 30 years. There's not been a new endometriosis medicine listed for the same time. And there had not been a new menopause hormone treatment for 20 years.
I understand you've heard from Anne Ruston while I was down in the chamber voting. Thank you to Anne for being here and for the really constructive relationship we're able to have in this area of health and disability and ageing.
We don't always agree, but we agree more than we disagree, and it's a very productive relationship, in the national interest. I hope it can produce some good results in this sector.
Before I left, I was talking about what the listings of three new oral contraceptive pills PBS and three new menopause hormone treatments have done for so many women.
I was able to report today that since those listings about 365,000 Australian women have accessed those medicines on the PBS, saving them millions and millions of dollars, which, frankly, they should not have been paying in the first place. These medicines should have been in the PBS much earlier.
Many of you, were at CanForum, which is another significant event in our Parliamentary calendar, pulled together by rare cancers Australia.
There was a really important discussion about making sure that all of the extraordinary health technology, and frankly, some services that allow timely diagnosis, are provided in an equitable fashion, and in the cancer space across the cancers equitably.
I want to talk to you tonight, obviously about health technology assessment. There is interest in this room about where the review is landing. It's a very weighty document. It's the first substantial review in 30 years, and deserves, a proper, sensible, measured consideration by Government.
I asked Andrew Wilson, who's here tonight, and thank you, Professor Wilson, for all of your work over many years in this policy area. I asked Andrew Wilson to pull together a group we called the Implementation Advisory Group to try and break down this very complex report into priority areas for the Government.
The group has been doing terrific work. I want to thank Andrew, but also Liz de Somer and Anne Harris, who have represented industry. Kirsten Pilatti from breast cancer network and Nicole Miller from Rare Voices representing a patient voice. Richard Mitchell from the Kids Cancer Institute in Sydney, who works at the cutting edge of therapeutics, new personalised therapeutics, particularly for Children's Cancer. Lorraine Anderson, with significant experience in First Nations Health, and a number of government reps as well. They have done extraordinary work breaking down this very complex report. Their interim report has just gone up on our website for you to consider when you get back to your hotel rooms, wherever it is that you stay in Canberra.
I am very grateful for Professor Wilson distilling some of his thoughts about how we should interpret that interim report. That letter, in the interest of transparency, has also gone up onto the website for you to consider.
I announce that we are taking immediate decisions to respond to that interim report. We will be taking immediate action to start trialling new processes to streamline assessments of co-dependent technologies.
As you know better than me, this is a more and more common part of the landscape as therapies no longer fit neatly into some of those old silos of either being a medicine or a diagnostic or a service. Increasingly requiring assessments and approvals to happen in different parts of the HTA system.
Already the two main bodies, MSAC and PBAC, are starting to try to align their consideration of the different parts of these co-dependent technologies. But we want to systematise, and I know that industry wants to systematise that a little better. We're going to start trialling those, those new ideas very quickly.
I've also accepted Professor Wilson and the group's recommendations to start a review of the PBAC guidelines, and we're going to do that in a rolling process. Rather than doing a single review of the whole guidelines, which would take some considerable time, we're going to start to pull out bits of the guidelines that we think are particular priorities and review them in a rolling fashion.
The first two parts of the guidelines that we are prioritising are the aspects of the guidelines that deal with comparative selection and with the discount rate. We will start that work very quickly with an intention to wrap up that review quickly as well.
We have also accepted the advice of the group to undertake rapid research in areas of high unmet clinical need and high added therapeutic value. These are obviously concepts very well known to this audience.
I've accepted the advice that we need to do work, even if only to try to reach an agreement around the definitions of those two critical load stars, or northern stars, for so much of the work that happens under HTA. We will be starting that process very quickly. We want to deal with it quickly as well.
A big part of the HTA review, and indeed the report of the IAG, has been to try to improve our engagement with stakeholders through the HTA process. We will be moving quickly to start to develop an HTA stakeholder engagement framework.
From my perspective, a particular focus on that will be on engagement with patients, consumers, and their representative organisations as well. I know a lot of that work is done terrifically well.
Deputy Chair of PBAC particularly leads that work and has done for many years. But I think we do need to start to systematise that a little better as well. That was a key recommendation of the HTA review. As part of that, we are committing to twice yearly meetings of that process to focus on the way in which medicines interact with First Nations communities. Again, that was a core theme of the HTA review.
Now this is only an interim report from the IAG. There is a lot more in the HTA review. What I wanted the advisory group to do was to start to break down this report and give government some advice on things we absolutely had to start doing now, and they have done that work.
They're a credit to industry, patient groups, whichever part of this vast ecosystem they particularly represent, and they've worked really well together. I'm not surprised, given the calibre of the group that we selected to be a part of this process.
We know there's more to do. The final report of the group is going to come in summer. There's a lot more for us to consider as we move forward building an HTA system that is strong and fit for purpose for the future. That it meets the interests of industry, which is the key investor in these new therapies, but also meets the interest of Australian patients and consumers as the ultimate beneficiaries of a high functioning PBS.
I'm committed to looking at that advice as quickly as I've tried to look at this latest advice, but I think now is the time get on with it. We've got five or six pieces of work that we've been able to extract from this really important report from the IAG and Andrew's supplementary advice to that. I look forward to working with you all to make it a reality.
Thanks very much again for coming along to Canberra, and for your forbearance as we went down and exercised our democratic responsibilities in the chamber.
And I look forward to catching up with you informally through the rest of the night.
Thank you.
