Individual Funding Requests (IFRs)

What is an Individual Funding Request (IFR)?

An Individual Funding Request, or IFR, can be made by your hospital consultant if they believe that a particular treatment or service that is licensed but is not routinely offered by Health and Social Care (HSC) in Northern Ireland is the best treatment for you, given your individual clinical circumstances.

The Department of Health (DoH) IFR policy document outlines the conditions and criteria under which hospital consultants, on behalf of their patients, can make an application for treatment. Click here to read more or download the IFR policy from the DoH website.

Who can make an individual funding request?

Your hospital consultant will make the funding request on your behalf and will discuss the outcome with you.

Individual funding requests cannot be accepted directly from patients or General Practitioners (GPs).

Download the IFR Application Form below:

 

Who considers the application?

From 9 June 2020, the new IFR Regional Scrutiny Committee will make decisions regarding the availability of unapproved drugs for individual patients in NI.

The Regional Scrutiny Committee replaces the previous IFR Panel, which has now been stood down. The Committee was established after a review and reformation of the IFR process.

The new IFR Regional Scrutiny Committee places clinical expertise at the heart of this sensitive and important decision-making process, ensuring that all IFR applications are subject to clinical input and peer review, as well as providing regional consistency.

The IFR RSC Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) sets out how the process for managing individual funding requests (IFRs) will operate.