Out today in Broadwalk handing out over a thousand leaflets highlighting our policies to ensure that patients have access to the Cancer Drugs they need.
We were joined by Geoffrey Van Ordern MEP alongside his family and a host of volunteers. I was particularly grateful to Dan Lucia and Colleen Morrison who were there from early morning to late afternoon. Another example of our great activists at work.
I am glad that Conservatives have pledged to establish a £200m 'Cancer Drugs Fund'. The money will be used to pay for medicines which have been licensed in the past five years but have not been approved for widespread use by NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence).
The Conservatives have established that not one new cancer drug assessed since November 2008 has been fully recommended and in more than a quarter of cases the drug assessed has not been recommended at all.
The Government promised that expensive new medicines would be considered for patient access schemes, under which the NHS and the pharmaceutical companies share the cost of the medicine, and yet in half of cases this has not happened.
This Conservative pledge is great news for cancer patients in Harlow who would have a chance to be prescribed medicines such as Avastin and Sutent for renal cell carcinoma and Tarceva for lung cancer.
Best of all, these medicines would be funded by the savings made to the NHS by abolishing Labour's National Insurance tax increase planned for April 2011!
P.S. Whilst we we're in Broadwalk, we had two teams canvassing in different parts of the constituency - alongside a phalanxe of leafleters. It's good to have so many volunteers. It's even better to be approached by one person after another offering to actively support the Conservative cause every day. It seems so many are excited about what might be.
