‘New Zealanders are dying’: Specialist’s plea for blood cancer drug funding

Thursday, 17 April 2025

Pharmac’s asthma inhaler plan could use up all of last year’s $600m funding boost—while blood cancer patients wait. Haematologists nationwide demand urgent drug funding in next month's Budget.

Pharmac on Thursday opened consultation on allowing asthma patients easier access to inhalers - which if approved would exhaust the record $600 million cancer drug investment announced last year.

But there are already calls for the Government to stump up more.

Blood cancer patients weren’t covered by the promise and 59 haematologists - almost all the blood cancer specialists in the country - have signed a letter to the Government urging them to take urgent action on funding blood cancer medicines in this year’s Budget.

Haematologist Rodger Tiedemann has seen too many patients he can’t adequately help due to a lack of funding.

“I mean, it’s terribly depressing as a physician to sit with patients and their families and explain that there are easy treatments that could be given that would turn their lives around. You know, would give them many more years, would improve their quality of life, but the Government has chosen not to provide those to Kiwis.”

In March he co-signed the letter to the prime minister, his deputy, the finance minister and health ministers pleading with them to commit more funding to blood cancer medicines.

“Unlike patients with solid tumours, they can’t undergo surgery or respond to radiation treatment. Their treatment is entirely dependent upon medicines and when the Government doesn’t fund those medicines they are simply forgetting those blood cancer patients,” he told Stuff.

Rodger Tiedemann is an associate professor at the University of Auckland, and an Antony and Margaret Morris Fellow in Cancer Research, Consultant Haematologist at Auckland Hospital.

The letter said the doctors had “ongoing serious concern” about the treatment of blood cancer patients.

Over 30 years as a visual journalist Jason Oxenham has told the stories of thousands of Kiwis. He now finds himself on the other side of the lens.

“The failure of this Government to provide access to modern medicines for these patients is wrecking lives and families, as Kiwis with blood cancer are left to deteriorate or die whilst waiting for treatments that are readily available in similar and often poorer nations,” the letter read.

“There is a lot to be said for Governmental economic thriftiness — except when underinvestment fails to deliver the desired outcome and costs human lives. Although medicines comprise a relatively small percentage of total health expenditure, excessively tight constraints on their provision in New Zealand has become a chokepoint that is seriously undermining patient outcomes, particularly those of blood cancer patients.”

Last year, the Government was pressured to fulfil its commitment to fund 13 cancer drugs promised by National on the election campaign.

It chose not to do so in Budget 2024, but after public pressure borrowed $600m from this year’s Budget to do so.

The cost of the policy was inflated from National’s election promise due to having to fund all drugs which were ranked above the 13 on Pharmac’s waitlist.

No blood cancer medicines were among the 13 promised as the Cancer Control agency was yet to produce a report outlining what New Zealand was lacking at the time National made the promise.

However Shane Reti, who was at the time National’s health spokesman at the time, did specifically say the party had not forgotten blood cancers.

“So again we are sending out a signal to people with Myeloma and the people with Leukemia, we understand, we haven’t forgotten you. We just need that piece of work to be done by the Cancer Control Agency,” he said.

Patient Advocate Malcolm Mulholland says that was interpreted blood cancer patients as a promise of equivalent treatment.

“The former minister of health, Shane Reti, said blood cancers, we have not forgotten you. So, people with blood cancer interpreted that as a promise and that’s a promise this Government have to deliver on.”

The Cancer Control Agency released the report last October, which found 12 blood cancer treatments funded in Australia but not here would have significant clinical benefit to New Zealanders.

When Stuff asked Health Minister Simeon Brown whether he would commit to funding blood cancer medicines, he referred back to the $600m announced last year.

“What we’ve committed to is what we provided in last year’s Budget which was $600m more over four years.”

But with Thursday’s release of a consultation on asthma inhalers, marking the final announcement related to the Government’s funding boost, and only about 180 of the 21,000 blood cancer patients having benefitted from drugs funded out of that pool, Tiedemann says that response amounts to a broken promise.

He met with Brown a couple of weeks ago to again impress the importance of funding. “I think he made a show of listening. I think he took notes but he made no commitments to change anything,” he told Stuff.

Mulholland is warning the Government it will have to look patients in the eye as it delivers its Budget on May 22.

“As we’ve done year on year, we will be coming in the gallery and listening to the budget being read and I will have blood cancer patients with me, blood cancer patients who will be seeing whether they live, whether they die or whether or not they have to sell their house or shift to Australia.”

Tiedemann had a simple message: “Wake up, prime minister. New Zealanders are dying and suffering.”