After Charlie Gard: ethically ensuring access to innovative treatment

The Charlie Gard case: British and American approaches to court resolution of disputes over medical decisions

INTRODUCTION On 8 June 2017, the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom rejected a legal appeal in the high-profile case of Charlie Gard, a British infant with a severe genetic disorder whose parents had disagreed with medical professionals and were requesting treatment that the doctors believed was futile. The case was the latest in a series of UK legal cases where courts have authorized withdraw...

Decoupling: Ensuring Access to Entitlements After Welfare Reform

Open Access to Innovative Drugs: Treatment Substitutions or Treatment Expansion?

Granting open access to new antipsychotic medications by the California Medicaid Program fostered the desired substitution of second-generation medications for conventional antipsychotics. However, open access also generated an immediate but temporary influx of previously treated patients, many with a recent institutionalization, who restarted drug therapy using the new antipsychotics. Persiste...

When Doctors and Parents Don’t Agree: The story of Charlie Gard

This discussion follows a series of high profile cases involving a terminally ill child, Charlie Gard. These cases are significant as they trace the complexities that arise when parents and medical teams do not agree as well as addressing the question of whether there is a right to access experimental treatment.

Access to innovative oncology medicines in Europe

This article intends to give an overview about developments in European Regulatory and Health Technology Assessment (HTA) of new cancer drugs. As background information, it will refer to an overview article by Bergmann et al. [1], which pointed out the status and the limitations of the current system. The authors discussed possible steps to improve the interface between regulators and HTA bodie...