Project’s background
Since several years the reform of reimbursement decision-making system has been implemented in Poland. Due to the access of Poland to the European Union, Polish public administration is now obliged to implement European system solutions including the Transparency Directive 89/105/EWG.
In order to make this implementation more efficient, the main goal of this project is to introduce socially supervised program which will monitor decisions of Polish public administration in terms of the drugs reimbursement in oncology and the transparency of the process as well as the comparative studies regarding patient access to cancer drugs globally.
Decisions related to the oncology drugs reimbursement are very sensitive social issues: the ones that are not favorable for the patients are very often being presented by media as a death sentence for the patients who are not able to cover the costs of the treatment themselves. This is the reason why it is more and more crucial to improve the decision-making process in a way that would minimize the social tensions accompanying them.
Taking into consideration all the above, creating a system, which is to analyze and report on the transparency of the drugs reimbursement process is essential for the civil society. The civil monitoring system will be responsible for encouraging public administration representatives to put more care into respecting the coherence between the recommendation along with the reimbursement decisions and the national and European law regulations.
Transparency of the drug reimbursement decision-making is defined on several levels:
- Every decision, the negative as well as the positive one, has to present very specifically the explanation behind it. This represents the servant role of the public administration towards the society.
- Communicating not only a full and complete argumentation and all the details behind each decision but also the path leading towards establishing it is a good that should not be limited for anyone unless in extraordinary circumstances.
- Transparency is also about including in the decision-making process those ones who are the most interested in its results, like the patients’ groups, social organizations, representatives of the public opinion and social observant.
