Where is the patient involvement in designing the DMT guidelines for Multiple Sclerosis?

According to the NHS: ‘People and communities are important to us because they help us improve all aspects of health care, including patient safety, patient experience and health outcomes – giving people the power to live healthier lives.’  

The NHS England algorithm for using DMT’s says: ‘The purpose of this algorithm is to provide a framework to aid decision-making for multiple sclerosis (MS) specialists and patients, to help reduce excessive variation in practice, and ensure safe and effective prescribing. It is understood that there may be situations where there is no single ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ therapeutic approach, and different experts may reasonably hold different views. ‘

Despite these unequivocal statements regarding ‘the patient’, Multiple Sclerosis patients have no input whatsoever into the decision making process about what drugs are used in MS and when. It is as if the treatment of multiple sclerosis is so complicated, the syntax so specialised, that unless one is a specialised neurologist or similar then comprehension is simply beyond them.

Keeping the patient voice out of one of the single most important areas of our treatment speaks to the very old fashioned patrician ‘Doctor knows best’ attitude. This gives the rhetoric around patient involvement a very hollow sound. Before the reply is made about MS Charity consultation reflecting the patient let’s put this to bed too. There are so very few patients with Multiple Sclerosis employed by these charities that when they claim to speak about the patient experience, that also rings hollow. Sure, you can ask them for input, to reflect patient attitudes etc but the replies you will get are mediated by people who do not have MS and, try as they might, can’t accurately reflect the patient experience.

If genuine patient involvement in MS care is to be more than just a phrase uttered by policymakers, to salve their own ears, by hearing themselves say it out loud at every available opportunity, then MS patients need to be directly involved in designing the NHS DMT prescribing algorithm. Repeated second-hand ad-hoc personal experiences or the representations made by well-meaning intermediaries are not a reliable or genuine substitute for including patients. Patient with lived experience of MS must be at the table and involved in both the discussion and the output. 

Until there is unmediated patient involvement in the construction of the prescribing algorithm, it is difficult to understand how the experts in MS patient care can do this while knowing full-well of the failure to involve the very patients who will take these treatments in the decision-making process. We, patients, are a very strange and diverse bunch when compared to the comparative uniformity of highly educated and very scientifically/technically/financially learned people who decide about drugs for our use created. The issues caused by allowing patients into the hallowed backrooms of clinical decision making are many and varied. Heck, I imagine disabled persons access/accommodation would rocket near the top of the agenda! These are not insurmountable hurdles, just different challenges.

Putting the patient’s names on the guidelines, having actual patient input into them is the very least we ought to expect, not the most we can hope for. 

Dear NHS, we want to be involved in the way that you say we should.

You talk the talk, but will you walk the walk?