Covid-19’s impact on SMC’s evaluation of rare disease treatments

SMC (Scottish Medicines Consortium) has had to prioritise elements of its workload due to the Covid-19 crisis. This is to allow for capacity issues arising from social distancing measures, because many members of SMC committees are key workers occupied by the Covid-19 response, and to focus on what the health and social care system will benefit most from at this time.

This means the SMC meetings and New Drugs Committees meetings scheduled for March, April and May 2020 have been cancelled. The SMC team will continue work on assessing the new medicine submissions that are currently in the system.

Decisions from the most recent SMC meeting in March will be published as usual on 13 April.

There is more information from SMC here.