Meeting with the new Acting CEO of Pharmac
On Friday 11th April 2025 Catherine Isaac, Chair of CLL Advocates NZ and Dr Ruth Spearing, Trustee, met with the new Acting CEO of Pharmac, Brendan Boyle along with the Chief Medical Advisor, Dr David Hughes and the Director of Pharmaceuticals, Geraldine MacGibbon. The aim of the meeting was to follow up on some of the issues that had been raised when Catherine and Ruth had met with Hon Paula Bennett, Chair of Pharmac and her colleagues, along with other members of the Blood Cancer Alliance, back in October of last year.
The major topic was whether Pharmac had made progress with the possibility of working with Health NZ where there was the potential for a particularly valuable nationally run trial which was not possible because of one drug not being funded. Pharmac has in the past enabled the previous DHBs to purchase such a drug enabling a very successful trial for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia to go ahead and is funding a couple of supportive care drugs for the CAR-T cell trials being run out of the Malaghan Institute. Trials will often not only offer cutting edge drugs to patients with great results but will also potentially save Health NZ a considerable amount of money. Unfortunately, the system is so siloed at the present time that this potential partnership between Pharmac and Health NZ does not occur and the huge benefits that could be realised, are lost.
As a result of our meeting and follow-up on this, David Hughes has undertaken to meet with Debra Matich from the Service Improvement and Innovation Directorate of Health NZ in early May to discuss this concept further.
Another topic that was covered was the time it has been taking to get minutes of meetings out – sometimes in excess of five months. The CEO apologised for this and undertook to ensure that the key decisions would be out within six weeks of the meeting and the full minutes within three months. The CEO was congratulated on the effort he had already made in the two weeks that he had been in post to engage with patient groups.