Pharmac has undergone “substantial change” in the past few years, even before a hard-hitting review found its decision-making needed to improve, its chairperson has told MPs.
Steve Maharey, speaking at a select committee, said the independent review, the first of its kind since the medicine-buying agency was set up more than 25 years ago, did not bring to light any issues the agency wasn’t aware of.
“I do think we acknowledge that the review has had value of confirming these issues,” he said at the Health Select Committee on Tuesday. “The value of the review is to reinforce and shed fresh light on the issue.”
Maharey and his chief executive Sarah Fitt spoke to the committee for the first time since the report was released last year. The interim report found the medicine-buying strategy appears to disadvantage Māori, Pasifika, disabled people and those with rare disorders and may have an “excessive focus on containing costs”.
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Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Pharmac chair Steve Maharey says the agency has made big changes in the past few years. (File photo)
Its final report said it must substantially improve and set out 33 recommendations with a focus on Pharmac’s governance and accountability, its decision-making and the spread of its functions and responsibilities. It also took a closer look at two areas of public concern: cancer medicines and rare disorders.
“These issues were on our radar, we would’ve liked to move faster [on them],” Maharey said. “The review is consistent with what we have been trying to do.”
The agency had already made changes to transparency, however, he said Pharmac’s history “is not one of doing things wrong”.
“The fact you can track your own medicine through, the way we were approaching consumers before the review was already changing,” he said. “The recent past is a substantial change.”
Pharmac got a major funding boost in this year’s budget, with $191 million to be invested over two years. Health Minister Andrew Little said was its biggest-ever increase and would help it buy more and better cancer medicines.
Fitt said many of the reports recommendations required cooperation across the health sector, but work on structural change was already underway.
This involves the “enhancement of assessment and decision-making, the attention that needs to be paid to achieving health equity, better involvement and preparation with others,” she said.
The agency was collaborating with other entities and working on improving access of medicines for Māori and Pacific.
“We are starting to work in quite a different way to how we have done in the past,” she said.
This involved “unpicking our whole process of how we run funding applications”. The agency had also run a project to identify where bottlenecks were.
The Ministry of Health was working on a medicines’ strategy, she said.
