Consultant's catch-up
This autumn the Field Team is starting to focus on new areas for the second half of the financial year and in the last edition my colleague, Gill Mathews, focussed on our activities within the NHS. However, much of our guidance is also relevant to local authorities in their capacity as service providers, with a responsibility for the health and wellbeing of local people. We are currently arranging meetings with regional fora of the Association of Adult Directors of Social Services (ADASS) to discuss how our guidance and implementation tools can help support the provision of high quality and cost effective social care services for adults. The discussions are focussing not only our existing public health guidance and clinical guidelines, but also on our forthcoming NICE Quality Standards, one of which will be on dementia.
Local authorities also have a role as scrutineers of both council and NHS services which is exercised via health overview and scrutiny committees (HOSCs). The Field Team is currently working with local HOSCs as part of their development programmes. We are running a number of workshops which explore concepts such as differing types of evidence and how it can be used to assess local services. We are also drawing members' attention to NHS Evidence as a valuable source of reference for local scrutiny programmes.
As part of the workshops, HOSCs and the Field team are also taking individual pieces of NICE guidance, and discussing how they can be used to support particular local scrutiny enquiries. For example, our suite of guidance on maternity care can be used to support councillors asking questions to clinicians, managers and commissioners working in this area.
There is an open invitation to all scrutiny committees who would like to participate in the workshop programme. Please contact us if you would like to arrange a session at fieldteam@nice.org.uk
For those of you who are working outside one of our current topic areas we haven't forgotten about you! In addition to the areas covered we have recently been invited to meet with PCT community services, clinical networks and audit and evaluation groups. We will always respond to requests wherever they come from so please contact us if you need help or advice.
This page was last updated: 06 November 2009
