Posted by Michael Wonder on 07 Apr 2019
Don’t attack NICE for relying on facts instead of emotion
3 April 2019 - The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence marks its 20th anniversary this week.
NICE is a world-leading example of how to make difficult choices about allocating scarce resources. It approves the use of medicines and other treatments on the basis of hard-headed calculations, not politics or popularity.
Centralising and codifying decisions on medicine helps to avoid “postcode lotteries” and largely keeps politicians out of the process. Reflecting its 1990s origins, NICE is a very centrist institution: created and run by people focused on evidence not emotion, it just does what works.
