Medical cannabis helping ‘miracle’ girl, mum says

59 minutes ago

Paul BarltropWest of England political editor

BBC A man and a woman stand together while the man holds their young daughter. The man is wearing a white T-shirt and has a dark beard. The woman is smiling. She has long dark hair and is wearing a black top. The girl is looking at the woman. She is wearing a light grey vest top and has curly light brown hair.

The mother of a six-year-old girl who takes medical cannabis to control her epileptic seizures has met a government minister to push for it to be available on the NHS.

Emily, from Somerset, says the family spend £750 a month buying the oil from a private clinic, which she said had massively helped her daughter Clover.

“She’s just a little miracle and we really do have cannabis to thank for a lot of that,” said Emily.

Health Minister Zubir Ahmed promised to accelerate getting medical cannabis evaluated for NHS use, Emily said. The Department of Health has been approached for comment.

Clover – from Nunney near Frome – has Aicardi Syndrome, which affects her brain and can cause dozens of seizures each day.

After researching treatments, her parents Emily and Spencer got her a prescription for medical cannabis in 2020.

They said they were delighted with the results and she was down to a few mild seizures each day.

The use of cannabis for medical purposes was legalised in the UK in 2018.

It can only be prescribed by specialist doctors and only a few types are available on the NHS.

The NHS normally only supports treatments once there have been medical trials and approval by the National Institute for Care and Health Excellence (NICE). This has not yet happened for the cannabis oil used by Clover.

As the treatment is not available on the NHS, the family are buying it privately. They said this had cost them £60,000 so far.

Clover’s parents said they would keep giving Clover medical cannabis for however long she needed it, as it had hugely increased her quality of life.

A man in a dark suit stands between two women. The woman on the left is wearing a dark skirt and light patterned jacket. The woman on the right is wearing a dark trouser suit.

After asking their MP Anna Sabine – who represents Frome and East Somerset – for help, she raised the issue with the prime minister in Parliament and Clover was invited to meet the health minister.

“He [Ahmed] was mortified that we’d been waiting for so long,” Emily said following the meeting.

“We’ve come out of there with a really clear course of action,” she added.

Sabine agreed: “The minister is from a medical background and understood a lot about the issues, so I’m going to keep pushing it.”