I RECENTLY accepted a petition, along with my colleagues Nick Ramsay and Darren Millar, signed by 100,000 calling for the Welsh Government to set up a cancer drugs fund.

Cancer is a disease which affects every family in Wales.

It is a sad fact that every family in Wales will have lost a relative or friend to cancer.

More than 120,000 people in Wales are living with, or after having, cancer in Wales.

Living with cancer is a traumatic experience for patients and their families and the Welsh Government owe it to the people of Wales to deliver efficient and effective cancer services.

They set the target of 95 per cent of urgent cancer patients to start treatment within 62 days of referral, a target that has not been met since 2008.

In August this year, in the Aneurin Bevan Health Board Area, less than 79 per cent of urgent cancer patients were treated within 62 days.

A report by the National Assembly’s Health and Social Services Committee expressed concerns about excessively long waits for diagnostic tests and missed waiting times targets.

Welsh Conservatives have long campaigned for a Cancer Treatments Fund.

This would ensure Welsh patients would have access to the most sophisticated and up to date cancer drugs and tackle the current post code lottery in access to treatment.

In England, a Cancer Drugs Fund was established in 2011.

It routinely funds a number of cancer medicines not otherwise available on the NHS.

The fund also receives requests for medicines to treat individuals with rarer types of cancer.

So successful has this scheme been with over 30,000 people getting access to cancer drugs that it has been extended to 2016.

But patients in Wales are denied access to life saving treatments.

We believe Wales needs a £5million Cancer Drugs Fund.

£5million is a small percentage of the current health budget.

Most of the money could be found by ending the nonsensical prescribing of paracetamol which last year cost the Welsh NHS more than £4.5 million pounds.

This money, in our view, would be far better spent on enabling Welsh cancer patients to have access to vital drugs and treatment.

The people of Wales deserve to have equal access rights to these treatment as those in England.