There are very precise regulations regarding what overseas treatment can be supported by the NHS. These regulations are slightly different depending on whether the treatment is in a country within the European Economic Area (EEA) or elsewhere.

Unfortunately in neither case will the NHS support entry into clinical trials.

The first steps in getting treatments in countries like France, which are within the EEA, can be summarised as follows:

• the consultant in charge of your care must agree that the treatment is necessary (this must be the consultant who is the specialist most closely connected with the type of treatment you are seeking - for example, if you are looking to have chemotherapy then it would need to be a specialist in chemotherapy treatment rather than, say, a surgeon).
• the consultant then has to make a strong case to the local Health Authority as to why the treatment is necessary and why it cannot be given in this country. This case has to be what is called 'evidence -based'. This means that there has to be clear evidence that the treatment is of proven value. The very fact that the treatment you are seeking is part of a trial means that it value is not proven and so the HA would not be able to approve funding. So for this reason your application would inevitably be refused. The regulations are quite clear that the treatment has to be 'well-established' and this rules out any experimental therapies.

Of course, you could always make your own, private arrangements, to have the treatment but this would almost certainly be very very expensive.

Although this may be disappointing do remember that the treatment you have heard of is a 'trial'. This means that the treatment is experimental and has not yet been definitely shown to be of value. There are many hundreds, if not thousands, of trials of possible new treatments for cancer going on around the world at any one time. Only a tiny handful of these will ever produce a worthwhile new treatment. Even those that do lead to new therapies often only offer a small improvement over what is already available. So the chance that the study you have heard of will actually be testing a treatment which would be of great benefit to you is very remote indeed.

Another point worth mentioning is that these experimental trials of new cancer treatments often get misreported by the media (who are always anxious for a new story about cancer). Newspaper articles, TV programmes or internet pages will often suggest that these studies are a 'breakthrough' or are using a 'wonder drug' and so, understandably, people think the treatment is far more promising than is really the case.