S2M-667 Wet Age-related Macular Degeneration

Scottish Parliament

Wednesday 4 February 2004

(Afternoon)

[THE PRESIDING OFFICER opened the meeting at 14:30]

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Wet Age-related Macular Degeneration

The Deputy Presiding Officer (Trish Godman): The final item of business today is a members' business debate on motion S2M-667, in the name of Kate Maclean, on photodynamic therapy for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration. The debate will be concluded without any questions being put.

Motion debated,

That the Parliament notes the recent decision by NHS Quality Improvement Scotland on the use of photodynamic therapy for the treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and acknowledges that photodynamic therapy is the only effective treatment for wet AMD, the most aggressive form of the disease and the leading cause of blindness in the UK, with around 650 new patients diagnosed with wet AMD in Scotland every year; is deeply concerned that funding has not been made available for clinicians to treat on the NHS those patients who urgently require the therapy, and endorses the demand by the Royal National Institute of the Blind Scotland and the Macular Disease Society that the Scottish Executive ensures that funding is immediately provided by all NHS boards, thereby saving the sight of those who could benefit from the therapy.

17:05

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17:14

Stewart Stevenson (Banff and Buchan) (SNP): I congratulate Kate Maclean on initiating a debate on this important subject. As the motion says, some 650 people in Scotland each year become sufferers of the condition, so it affects people throughout Scotland.

It is difficult to engage with the subject at a technical level. For example, the description of the condition that one of my constituents has is:

"classic with no occult subfoveal choroidal neovascularisation".

It is not especially useful to go into such technical complexities in the debate. The issue is really—and inevitably—about people and the effect that the condition has on them.

I have known the constituent of mine who suffers from the condition for many years. He is a lively 80-year-old, but I can see a change in him. He has the misfortune—in one sense—to live in the NHS Grampian area, which has not had the discretionary funds to make treatment available to him. That has been particularly difficult for him because he has seen people come from south-west Scotland with NHS funding to one of the only treatment centres in Scotland, which happens to be in Aberdeen.

Of course, he could have bought treatment from the NHS and an offer was made. I understand the difficulties that are involved in deciding a fair and equitable policy for providing treatment in the early stages. However, let us consider the 650 people—I would be interested to hear the minister's numbers—and the costs that are involved. I do not think that the cost of providing the treatment in question exceeds £1 million. I do not have such money in my back pocket and it is not a trivial amount, but we must make the important contrast between it and the several millions of pounds that those 650 people would end up costing the public purse if they were not rescued from having a lack of sight. The difficulty is that different budgets are involved.

Fortunately, my constituent ended up contacting a specialist in Edinburgh and we managed to get him on a programme. However, he suffered from the wet form of the condition, which—as John Scott was informed—is a matter of extreme urgency. There was a delay of some six or seven weeks before he was treated on the NHS, which, with the wet form of the condition, is enough time for a person to lose around 50 per cent of the remaining sight that is provided by the macula, or the centre of the eye, which is the part of the eye that enables a person to recognise people, watch television and read books. One can be left with orbital sight, which enables one to navigate and move around, but the condition is serious. For people such as my constituent who are well stricken in years, such things can be difficult to cope with.

I hope that the minister will tell us that moneys will be available in the future to treat people with the condition and that there will be a relatively consistent policy throughout Scotland. I also hope that he will tell us that the two and a half years that it has taken before treatment for some forms of the disease is approved is not the kind of period that might be experienced with diseases that need treatment similarly urgently in future.

17:18