Comment: Learning lessons the hard way

Last week's decision by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence on the provision of Lucentis in England is one government U-turn that has been well received, but has been a long time in the coming.

That sufferers of wet age-related macular degeneration have gone blind in the two and a half years it took Nice to reach that final decision takes some of the gloss away, as does the 'Postcode lottery' where patients of some PCTs were refused the treatment while others went ahead prior to the decision.

The idea that along the way, sufferers would have to go blind in one eye before treatment was seen as a particularly heartless approach to healthcare, irrespective of the fact that £10,000 per injection per eye is no trifling matter.