The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) helps practitioners and commissioners get the best care to patients, fast, while ensuring value for the taxpayer.  

NICE is transforming to ensure we can meet the opportunities and challenges of the changing health and care landscape.  

Every year, NICE produces hundreds of guideline recommendations, evaluations of medicines, medical devices, diagnostics, and digital products. With the health and care system under significant pressure, we need to prioritise our guidance to focus on what matters most. We are doing this by developing a NICE-wide prioritisation and topic selection function which will be underpinned by stakeholder engagement.  

How NICE prioritises its activities will have consequences on health and social care delivery, so it’s essential that we understand public opinion (as taxpayers funding the health service, and as potential users) on this significant change. 

With support from Sciencewise, NICE Listens, our programme of deliberative public engagement, ran a public dialogue on how NICE should prioritise its topics for guidance to the health and care system. The findings will be considered in the development of a decision framework, which will be used to guide decisions on prioritisation and topic selection.  

The public dialogue, delivered by Thinks Insight & Strategy, engaged 56 members of the public who are broadly reflective of the English population that NICE serves. There were 4 workshops between November and December 2024. 

An oversight group, chaired by Simon Denegri OBE, Executive Director of The Academy of Medical Sciences, is in place to guide the design of the dialogue.