Foreword by the Secretary Of State
People in every part of our country want prompt and convenient access to top quality treatment and care. That is why we are setting up the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), which goes live in April.
NICE will command the respect of doctors, nurses and other clinical professionals and provide authoritative guidance on what treatments work best for patients.
Its evidence-based guidelines will be used right across the country, so NICE will help end the unacceptable geographical variations in care that have grown up in recent years.
By identifying which new developments will most improve patient care, it will help spread good value new treatments more quickly across the NHS. This in turn will promote and encourage successful innovation on the part of clinicians, pharmaceutical companies and the medical devices industry.
Equally, by sorting out the wheat from the chaff it will protect patients from outdated and inefficient treatment, and so enable the NHS to do a better job for patients.
So NICE is an important building block in the modernisation of the NHS.
This document sets out our detailed proposals for how the NICE appraisal process should work. This week I am also laying before Parliament the draft Order establishing NICE. We want to develop a workable system that is fair to patients, to those work in the NHS, and to those who develop products and treatments for the NHS. We want an NHS that is modern and dependable.
Frank Dobson
Secretary of State for Health
