DAILY POST YOUR VOICE IN WALES: The right and moral thing to do on vital drug choices.

HEALTH minister Edwina Hart was right to order health boards to allow kidney cancer patients vital drugs to give them - literally - a new lease of life.

The Daily Post has never been slow to criticise those in authority who wield the power of life and death over helpless patients denied medical treatment for bafflingly opaque reasons.

Time after time comes the same old answer - that the costs of certain drugs are prohibitively high, and no-one knows for sure if they work.

Yet all too often, red tape and sheer incompetence have played a frustratingly large part in the decision-making process.

In this instance, the case for prescribing life-extending drugs like Sutent is clear cut. It doesn't cost a fortune and there is abundant medical evidence of its benefit to seriously ill cancer patients.

So well done Edwina Hart, for cutting through all the torpor and obfuscation by decreeing that local health boards should make four specialist drugs available to sufferers of kidney cancer.

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence continues to keep the drugs under review but here in Wales, they will now be made available and for free.

While elsewhere in Britain there is yet more reviewing and pausing for thought, in Wales we have decisive action.

Hurrah for a little common sense.