The NHS Or the Patient to Pay?
A woman was spared jail yesterday after taking out loans for £1000 in false names to pay for her grandmother’s treatment for Alzheimer’s.
The woman fraudently applied for a total of 18 loans in an attempt to fund a £250 per month drug for her grandmother, which had been refused by the NHS.
She had already borrowed a total of £20,000 from her employer, a loan company called Provident Personal Credit. On being refused further loans in her own name, she started to borrow using fictitious names.
Magistrates heard that her grandmother, who was over 90, was prescribed Aricept – a drug that slows the advance of Alzheimer’s – when she was residing in Kent.
On moving to Basingstoke to be with her grand daughter, she was refused the drug by the local NHS Trust. She was prescribed tranquillising drugs by doctors at her local hospital, the Southampton General, instead.
Her granddaughter said that her grandmother had become terrified and acted like a toddler when she was using the tranquillisers. The family wanted a second opinion and following a private consultation she was again prescribed with Aricept.
Repayments on the false loans were becoming a burden on her granddaughter and she was forced to reveal her dishonesty to her employers. In court her counsel said that she had been ‘very brave’ to admit her offences.
In defence, he said that the fraud was perpetrated to finance her granny’s treatment and not to fund a ‘champagne lifestyle’. It was revealed that the granddaughter had twin sons, who suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome and needed a lot of care.
The granddaughter had already commenced to repay the £6,297 due to her employers and it emerged that she had a previous conviction for making false loan applications..
She was given a community punishment order and fined £50. The magistrate said that she had escaped a jail sentence because she had shown remorse, had pleaded guilty and was making repayments.
In 2005, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, recommended that Aricept should only be used for patients with a medium degree of Alzheimer’s.
Neil Hunt, the head of the Alzheimer’s Society, said that the condition of sufferers of dementia should not deteriorate before they receive treatment which improves their lives.
He added that the UK Government saves £6 billion a year through the work of unpaid carers, many of whom are on the poverty line and therefore cannot afford treatment for their relatives. To deny people access to drugs during the early stages of Alzheimer’s makes no moral or economic sense, he says.
Hampshire Primary Care Trust maintains that it followed NICE guidelines and that the decision to prescribe a particular drug lay with the consultant.
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