Joint NICE/SIGN statement on working together to improve patient care

The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) develops clinical guidelines, undertakes health technology appraisals and provides other authoritative clinical guidance for the National Health Service (NHS) in England and Wales. The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) develops clinical guidelines for NHS Scotland.

SIGN and NICE are both members of the AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines, Research and Evaluation) collaboration, an international network of guideline development and appraisal programmes. Members of the AGREE collaboration all develop guidelines according to the same basic principles of multidisciplinary involvement in developing recommendations based on a systematic review and critical appraisal of the evidence base; and both NICE and SIGN aim to meet the international standard set by the AGREE guideline appraisal instrument (available from www.agreecollaboration.org).

Although there are some differences in the processes of guideline development used by SIGN and NICE, we believe that we can share many elements of the development process between us in order to avoid duplication of effort and help us to provide the highest quality guidance to the NHS. As a first step, over the next two years, NICE and SIGN will collaborate on developing lung cancer guidelines by sharing the work involved in reviewing the evidence base which underpins the guideline recommendations (and which accounts for the majority of the resource input into the development process). We will also seek an opportunity to work together to produce a guideline together on a suitable topic. This will enable us to evaluate both the feasibility of shared guideline development and its acceptability to guideline users throughout the country.

In the meantime, wherever possible we will work with our sponsors to ensure that our programmes are as complementary as possible - enabling us to build on, rather than duplicate, each other's work, and collectively to address as many of the clinical areas of concern to practitioners and patients as possible.