Ref: NICE 2000/025 Issued: 7 August 2000

NICE is keen to hear from organisations that feel they have a legitimate interest in the clinical guidelines it is developing and have asked them to contact the Institute expressing their interest. The process involves completing and returning to NICE a Stakeholder Interest Form.

Anne-Toni Rodgers (Communications Director) said "Unlike our appraisals work, which focuses on one specific technology, our clinical guidelines will focus on a range of care and service delivery within a specific area. This means that a wide variety of stakeholders could legitimately have an interest in the work we are doing.

Typically these stakeholders will be the national organisations that represent patients and carers, those that represent health professionals and also individual commercial companies working in the area covered by the guideline.

It may not be immediately obvious to those outside an organisation that it has a legitimate interest in a specific topic. In order that we can include appropriate contributions from as many organisations as possible we have decided to ask organisations and companies to register their interest with us.

To do this they need to complete and return a Stakeholder Interest Form. This form provides the Institute with details of the organisation, a named contact, and a short explanation of the organisation's interest in the topic.

The Institute's preferred communications media is electronic and we would like organisations to use the Stakeholder Interest Form on our web site and return it to us by e-mail; however if an organisation does not have access to the Internet they can write to us to request a form.

This initial call for expressions of interest focuses on specific guidelines. Some of these guidelines are already in development as they were commissioned by the Department of Health prior to the establishment of NICE, others are new guidelines that we will be commissioning.

We would like to hear from organisations as soon as possible."

Ends.

Note for Editors.

1. The areas covered by this initial call for expressions of interest are as follows:

    Guidelines in Development
  • Secondary prevention for patients who have experienced a myocardial infarction: management in primary care
  • Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment and Prevention
  • Electronic Fetal Monitoring
  • Induction of labour
  • Non-insulin dependent Diabetes Series
  • Improving Outcomes in Cancer Service Guidance Series
    Breast Cancer (Update)
    Urological Cancer
    Haemato-oncology

    Guidelines Under Commission

    • Multiple Sclerosis
    • Schizophrenia
    • Hypertension
    • Pre-operative Investigations
    • Peptic Ulcer and Dyspepsia
    • Management of Depression in the Community
    • Improving Outcomes in Cancer Service Guidance Series

    Colorectal Cancer (Update) Head and Neck Cancer

    2. Full details of the Institute's guideline development process, membership of the guidelines Advisory Committee and the clinical guidelines work programme are available on the Institute's website.

    3. Clinical guideline development has the following 5 sections. For new guidelines The Institute will commission a Collaborating centre to develop the guideline and stakeholder involvement is as follows:

      Initiation
    • Call for Expression of Interest from stakeholders
    • The institute identifies stakeholders for the commissioning document.
    • The Institute will circulate the draft scope for the guideline (i.e. the area the guideline will cover) to stakeholders who have up to four weeks to provide comment.

      Commissioning

    • Representatives of key professional and patient/carer stakeholder organisations will be invited to join the Guideline Development Group.
    • Following the consultation period, the following will be sent to all stakeholders and posted on the Institute's website.
      - the membership of the guideline development group (including stakeholder organisations)
      - the scope, the specification for the guideline - the deadline for submission of evidence from stakeholders
      - the time-points for the guideline development
      Development
    • Contributions from stakeholders in the forms of ‘submissions of evidence'.

      Validation

    • The first version of the final draft will be sent to stakeholders who will have up to four weeks to comment
    • The second version of the final draft will be posted on the website. The period of consultation with stakeholders will be four weeks.

      Publication

    • The Institute will publish the guideline summary and the patient version.
    • The guideline summary, the patient version and the full guideline will be available on the Institute's website.
    4. For those guidelines thatthat had already been commissioned are under development and are close to completion, stakeholder contribution will be limited to commenting on the final drafts.