Our view is that wait times are too long, and there's no guarantee any medication that is put before Pharmac will be funded. The clinical committee considers applications and makes recommendations to the Pharmac board, which says yes or no to the funding and gives it a priority of low, medium, or high.
Medicines New Zealand has done a project we call “the waiting list” to look at how many of those products that have been give a priority are actually funded. At the moment, an increasing number of medicines are waiting for funding. They have been recommended for funding, but haven't been given funding. Often it's the low-priority medicines that come recommended from the public board committee that receive funding first, not the high-priority ones.
There's a lot of work to do here to get priorities right. There are some issues around transparency as well.
That only answers your question in part, but those are some issues we'd like to highlight for you. They're things that are problematic with this type of model that do need to be looked at if they're going to make best practice on other HTAs.