Equal Access Campaign

We called on you to pledge your support for our campaign for Equal Access to life-prolonging cancer drugs for patients in Northern Ireland. More than 70,000 local people responded and pledged their support on line or in writing. We’d like to thank everyone who helped in any way with this campaign.

We presented the pledges to the Health Minister Jim Wells at Stormont on Tuesday  October 7, 2014, when First Minister Peter Robinson had a private conversation with cancer patient Allister Murphy to hear his experience at first hand. We are currently awaiting a response from Stormont on the issue.

Cancer Focus NI launched the three month campaign in June 2014 in partnership with the Daily Mirror and with the support of 14 local charities. The campaign received 10,000 pledges of support via email, letters and postcards within 11 days. Because of this fantastic response, we increased our target to 20,000, which was  exceeded.

There are currently 38 cancer drugs available to patients in England that are not readily available to patients in Northern Ireland. Anyone who would like to pledge their support for equality of access for local patients should visit www.equalaccessni.org.

Cancer Focus NI has been a driving force in the campaign to overhaul the current system to fund life-extending cancer medicines here since 2010. For more information about this campaign, contact us on 028 9066 3281.