How does the operation of PHARMAC's 'Community Exceptional ...

Q There is a limited budget for Community Exceptional
Circumstances…$3million. Have you ever experienced a case or
cases where the Exceptional Circumstances Panel has said “Yes this
needs to be funded for this person, all the criteria are met”… and
PHARMAC managers or Board say “No, we can’t afford it” ?
A Yes on Community Exceptional Circumstances once, but I very well
recall that both PTAC Committee on antiretrovirals said PHARMAC
should fund Raltegravir and Duranavir. Both went forward with
strong recommendations to be funded together … it was proven by
good international research that they work well in combination.
PHARMAC chose to fund Raltegravir and not Duranavir. They
cherry picked…disregarded the clinical evidence for financial
reasons.
Q What does that say about these criteria that PHARMAC use, both
Exceptional Circumstances and the schedules?
A ...they are just a means of enabling PHARMAC to say “No” when
they want to. (Interviewee H)
Section 5: Request Under the Official Information Act 1982
As described in Chapter 4 (Methods), documents which are held by government
departments and Crown Agencies are available to members of the public under
certain opportunities and conditions provided by the OIA. Significant use of this
method of gathering official information has been made by academic
researchers, politicians and members of the press (White, 2007). Members of
the public also use OIA requests for their own political, legal, commercial or
general interest purposes.
This section of the thesis examines the five requests and reports on the material
which was made available by this method of data procurement. Some of the
documents were provided in hard copy and some by Word or PDF files. I
entered the Word documents into NVivo 8 as sources, but PDF files cannot be
entered into NVivo 8. Consequently, I typed the relevant material into a table
and then entered it into NVivo 8 as a source.
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