We're developing a new centralised approach to prioritising our guidance topics.
This will ensure that we produce guidance that is relevant, timely, accessible, and has demonstrable impact.
Why we prioritise
It's important that we prioritise those areas of guidance development and delivery that will have greatest impact on the health and care system. One of our core strategic ambitions is to focus on what matters most. The NICE prioritisation board will drive this decision making process.
The role of the NICE prioritisation board is to:
- Review and discuss topics, which will enable effective decision-making for guidance prioritisation.
- Maintain a forward view of topics and a rolling plan in response to changes in system need and demand.
- Publish its decisions, ensuring visibility and transparency to enable effective sharing of information with our stakeholders.
Jonathan Benger, Chief Medical Officer, Deputy CEO and Interim Director of the Centre for Guidelines explains NICE’s new approach to prioritising topics.
How topics are prioritised
Until recently, we prioritised guidance through multiple topic selection processes.
Using our new, centralised approach, we will be able to produce guidance that's more coordinated, efficient and avoids the risk of duplication.
We've achieved this through the creation of:
- A central prioritisation board. This will use a common prioritisation framework to decide priorities and coordinate delivery.
- A common prioritisation framework. This will be applied to all topics and products considered by NICE in a consistent and transparent way, apart from medicines where our statutory duties remain unchanged.
The central prioritisation board will also make routing decisions for highly specialised technologies, using existing criteria. These criteria will be reviewed in the coming year.
Jonathan Benger, Chief Medical Officer, Deputy CEO and Interim Director of the Centre for Guidelines on why it is important for NICE to prioritise topics.
Benefits to the NHS and across health and social care
Our prioritisation framework will ensure that we are focusing on the areas that matter most to the health and care system, aligned to national priorities.
These include:
- NHS priorities and operational planning guidance
- NHS long term plan
- Major conditions strategy
- Medical technology strategy
- Health inequalities
- NHS Innovation Accelerator
- Build Back Better: our plan for health and social care
- Strengths-based social work
- Building the right support for people with a learning disability and autistic people.
Forward view
We will highlight the areas that NICE will prioritise in the coming year through our forward view. These topics will be refreshed on an annual basis.
Suggest a topic
The following groups can suggest a topic for our prioritisation board.
Health and social care staff, patients and the public
If you would like to suggest a topic for guidance development, please complete this form.
Manufacturers, distributors and agents
To allow NICE to identify suitable health technologies for prioritised topic areas, please register and enter details about your product on the NHS Innovation Service.
Health and care staff and companies
Tell us about an interventional procedure you think should be assessed by NICE. This can be a new procedure or a review of our existing guidance.
Key documents
Contact us
For further information about our prioritisation process please email, topics@nice.org.uk.