IT IS with guarded optimism that we welcome the abolition of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence’s vice-like grip over the availability of drugs based on cost.

Too many times people’s lives and, more crucially for themselves and their relatives, their quality of life in those final days was ruined because they were deprived drugs their clinician believed would help.

But the Government must ensure there is a genuine improvement and not just a replacement bureaucracy putting money ahead of people.