{"id":376,"date":"2011-12-04T20:57:23","date_gmt":"2011-12-04T19:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sigbi.org\/gosport-fareham-and-district\/?p=376"},"modified":"2011-12-05T16:37:11","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T15:37:11","slug":"how-much-is-a-life-worth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sigbi.org\/solent-east\/2011\/12\/04\/how-much-is-a-life-worth\/","title":{"rendered":"How much is a life worth?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\n<\/a>President Margaret Smith is pictured with our speaker Duncan Colin-Jones and club member Christine White who had suggested he be invited to address the club.\u00a0 During his clinical career Duncan had worked locally at QA hospital.<\/p>\n

He challenged the club to answer the question \u201cHow much is a life worth?\u201d which had been his focus in his work with NICE, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence.\u00a0 One part of their role was to evaluate new drug treatments for efficacy and cost-effectiveness.\u00a0 He reminded us that any money for new drug treatments had to be taken away from something else within the NHS capped budget.\u00a0 The money spent on drugs amounted to \u00a311bn a year, about a tenth of the total NHS spend.<\/p>\n

Duncan included a quick biology lesson, to explain the structure of human cells, and the bits of DNA (genes) that cause cancer.\u00a0 Modern developments in testing (including one advance he mentioned that had only been reported in the US this month) mean that specific chemotherapy drugs can be tailored to target particular defective genes.<\/p>\n

But in answer to his question, he explained that NICE had developed a measure called Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY), ranging from full health=1 to dead=0, to compare the relative benefits of different drugs.\u00a0 In the drug appraisals he had been involved in the allowable cost was set at about \u00a320,000 per QALY, rising to \u00a330,000 by the time he retired.\u00a0 This tried to take account of the benefit against quality of life measures such as mobility, self care, pain and anxiety, against the potential advantages and disadvantages of drugs, particularly chemotherapy treatments.\u00a0 This led to a discussion about the value to society of particular patients, such as a young mother rather than an older person, and how rigid the decisions had to be, against a limited set of data on the outcomes from use of the drugs.\u00a0 Overall, a serious topic explained with plenty of examples and inspiring an interesting debate of the issues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Margaret Smith is pictured with our speaker Duncan Colin-Jones and club member Christine White…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-club-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHow much is a life worth? | News | Blog | Events | SI Solent East<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"SI Solent East : Blog & News : How much is a life worth? : Keep up to date with the latest news, articles and events from the Soroptimists of SI Solent East . 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