National consensus statement

Bridging funding to enable faster access to medicines in Australia

November 2024

Australians currently can wait more than 442 days for reimbursed access to registered medicines to treat their disease.

Australian patients do not have the time to wait for equitable and fair access to medicines.

Australia’s leading cancer patient advocates, clinicians, medical researchers and pharmaceutical industry representatives support the rapid implementation of medicine bridging funding.

Bridging funding for medicines in Australia would provide earlier, faster and fairer access to medicines - by bridging the gap for government reimbursed access between TGA registration and PBS funding for therapies that address a high unmet need.

Guiding principles

Patient impact Bridging funding is a form of temporary funding that enables eligible Australian patients to access medicines at the time of Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) registration, where the medicine is an improvement in treatment – providing high added therapeutic value OR addresses high unmet clinical need. The option for bridging funding will be designed to help more Australians access medicines who may have received a prognosis where they need access to time-critical treatment, where there are no other equivalent options.
Co-design There are multiple options available to government to design the assessment process and bridging funding mechanism. The Bridging funding mechanism should be co-designed with clinicians, patient advocacy groups and policy experts, patients and industry, while ensuring a patient-centred approach to faster access to medicines. The government could formalise their intention to establish a bridging funding mechanism through the establishment of a dedicated working group.
Relationship with reimbursement and reform Bridging funding for medicines should be available in parallel to the reimbursement evaluation process and at the time of TGA registration to provide faster patient access to medicines. Bridging funding should be rapidly designed and implemented as one of the first actionable recommendations from the HTA Review, in the Government’s delivery of overall HTA reform. Bridging funding should be limited in duration, require specific entry criteria for a treatment indication to be eligible for bridging funding, include the requirement that the sponsor is submitting an application for reimbursement of the indication to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) and include contingency arrangements that do not interrupt treated patient care should reimbursement not be agreed between the Sponsor and Government. Bridging funding should not be designed to bypass or affect the HTA process for long term government reimbursement; nor prolong pricing negotiations or reimbursement implementation. Government and industry must work together on bridging funding arrangements, with reimbursement the optimal aim for all medicines made available to patients on bridging funding.

The Bridging Funding Coalition now calls on the Government to ensure Australian patients get faster access to medicines by:

Committing to establishing bridging funding for medicines, and
Establishing an Independent Expert Implementation Group to rapidly co-design a sustainable criteria and model for bridging funding.

This consensus statement aligns with recommendations for bridging funding in the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Review final report ‘Accelerating access to the best medicines in Australia now and into the future – A review of Australia’s health technology assessment policies and methods for the Australian Government’, launched in September 2024. This report provides a preliminary review of bridging funding eligibility for Government consideration.