(Trigger Warning - child death) Meningitis B catch up programme (petition included)

[LondonMix]

Up thread I said there is a qualitative judgement that goes into setting priorities regarding young and old, preventative care vs treatment and that's a debate worth having.

However, unless we want to reset the entire priorities system for all assessments made by the JVCI (maybe so), in the current system that's been established, this was the right decision. Decisions can't be made ad hoc by public pressure.

Also Saffron are you sure the cost benefit analysis looks at the specific budget in any given year when establishing new health protocols or is it based on value for money-- i.e. a more typical cost benefit analysis? Most analysis like this uses some formula that determines how much benefit (additional years of life etc) the treatment will generate across a specified population versus the cost of administering something across the same group and sets up some cut off ratio as the value. I'm not sure how it works for the NHS so this is a genuine question.

[LondonMix]

I found the answer to my second question-- the short answer is no.

https://www.york.ac.uk/media/che/documents/NICE%20Threshold%20Press%20Release%20190215.pdf

The long answer is that the underlying assumption is that NHS resources (whatever they might be) are not specifically increased to fund any new treatments when the analysis is done so that the value of new treatments must be better than or equal to existing treatments on the NHS.