I have been in contact with NICE and this is their reply:
Quote:
Thank you for contacting the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
Apologies for the delay in responding to your email.
I understand you are referring to the final draft guidance (known as a final appraisal determination, or FAD) issued for 'Lapatinib for breast cancer (for use in women with previously treated advanced or metastatic breast cancer)'.
The FAD has been sent to the formal consultee organisations for this appraisal, who have 15 working days to consider whether they wish to appeal against it. The appeal period for this appraisal will close at 5pm on 27/03/2009.
An appeal may be made by any of the consultees to the appraisal. Individuals are unable to submit an appeal.
Subject to any appeal by consultees, the FAD may be used as the basis for the Institute's guidance on the use of the appraised technology in the NHS in England and Wales.
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Basically what this says is that they will not take any notice of anything from anyone other than the people who were originally consulted in arriving at this decision. So this petition will have no effect on NICE.
What is desperately needed is every single UK resident who has signed this petition to contact their Member of Parliament and ask that they get involved in trying to get the Government to do something about this. There has been a lot in the papers recently about how bad the UK is for cancer survival - the UK is not much better than 3rd world countries - so this should wake them up a bit.
Somehow this has to be brought to the attention of the mass media here in the UK because until we get this I doubt that there will be enough folks signing any petition to have much effect. I also feel that the right place for a petition such as this was the UK Government petition website, but even if it were there it is the oxygen of publicity which is needed to get the ball rolling.
So please every UK resident contact your own local MP, my wife has done this and he has promised to raise it with the Health Secretary and reply to her. If every UK person does this we might just start something, but it needs every one of you to do it and do it this week.