In its recent report on top-up fees the Health Select Committee backed moves to allow patients to privately fund drugs not recommended by NICE, without placing their NHS care at risk.

But it said it was concerned that the proposed separation between private and NHS care could result in patients being moved, ‘so as to administer a privately paid for drug separately’.

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‘This undoubted disruption to a patient’s quality of life just to meet some bureaucratic requirement would endanger the patient’s care,’ it said.