Examples of how you could use our guidance in a voluntary or community sector organisation.
Identifying best practice
Guidance can help identify what best practice looks like in health and social care. This helps you to evaluate service provision and commissioning.
This can include:
- understanding what best practice is for a specific topic
- checking if our recommendations are being commissioned and provided
- developing research projects and questions about the quality of provision and commissioning.
Our patient experience in adult NHS services guideline recommends that healthcare professionals help people using services to understand treatment options. This includes the benefits, risks and potential consequences of care.
When assessing if a service delivers a good experience, you could ask:
Have healthcare professionals supported you to understand the treatment options? This may include the benefits, risks and potential consequences of care?
Developing service improvement plans
Using our guidance helps you to base service improvement plans on the current evidence of what’s effective and good value care. This helps you make achievable and realistic improvement recommendations to providers, commissioners, and strategic boards.
Examples include:
- assessing public concerns and complaints to understand if services didn’t meet expected standards
- supporting your findings to escalate and prioritise concerns
- checking if strategic plans, action plans and commissioning decisions align with our guidance
- working with voluntary and community sector organisations to understand adapting our guidance to a local area and population.
Information and advice
Organisations can use our guidance to enhance the information they provide to the public. This can help the public understand what they should expect from services they use.
Here are some examples of how you could use NICE guidance:
Incorporating information
Mind's website provides information on mental health and wellbeing. In their information they refer to relevant NICE guidance. They give a small summary and a link to guidance on our website.
Summarising our guidance for your audience
The MND Association created patient friendly resources to support our guideline on motor neurone disease. These include a summary of the expected standards of care and an animated video setting out key aspects of the guideline.
They also surveyed providers of care services. They provided suggestions of where practice could be changed to meet our recommendations and improve standards of care.
Share important messages from us on your website
The Rainbow Trust published an article on their website to tell people about published guidance. They summarised what it means to people and publically supported the recommendations.
Include important messages from us in material you produce
Guts UK wrote an article in their newsletter telling members about our guidance for pancreatitis. They explained what NICE guidance is, and included quotes from lay members who sat on the guideline development committee.
Using social media to share information
Kidney Care UK tweeted a link to their website, informing their audience about recently published guidance.
Other ways of using our guidance
We're also aware of information being shared to other organisations so they're aware of recently published guidance and opportunities to get involved with NICE. Some organisations have promoted our guidance at events and meetings.