Accident and emergency departments - guideline consultation

Consultation dates: 16 January 2015 - 12 February 2015

We are now consulting registered stakeholders on the draft guideline on safe staffing for nursing in accident and emergency (A&E) departments and would like to hear from you.

How to comment

1.Register as a stakeholder

Your organisation needs to be registered as a stakeholder.

You can still register. If you do not belong to an organisation that can register as a stakeholder, we recommend that you contact the registered stakeholder organisation that most closely represents your interests and pass your comments to them.

2. Read the consultation documents

Consultation documents

• Draft guideline
• Appendix 1 - Evidence to recommendations tables
• Economic report
• Economic report appendices
• Economic modelling report
• Evidence review
• Comments form
• Equality Impact Assessment

Background information:

• Possible areas for comment on the draft guideline - for example, does the guideline reflect the evidence, promote equality, address issues important to people using services and take account of their preferences and choices?
• Developing NICE guidelines: how to get involved

3. Make your comments and submit them

If your organisation and another registered stakeholder have similar views on the guideline, we encourage you to send a joint response from 1 organisation. The other organisations should then respond separately, endorsing the comments.

Please submit comments to SafeStaffingGuidelineConsultation@NICE.org.uk by 5pm on 12 February 2015 at the latest.

Checklist for submitting comments:

• Use the comment form and submit it as a Word document (not a PDF).
• Combine all comments from your organisation into 1 response. We cannot accept more than 1 response from each organisation.
• Underline and highlight any confidential information or other material that you do not wish to be made public.
• Do not include medical information about yourself or another person from which you or the person could be identified.
• For copyright reasons, comment forms do not include attachments such as research articles, letters or leaflets (for copyright reasons). We return comments forms that have attachments without reading them. The stakeholder may resubmit the form without attachments, but it must be received by the deadline.

What happens next

• The Committee will consider all the comments when revising the guideline. The Developer will respond to comments from registered stakeholders, and the comments and responses will be published alongside the final guideline on the NICE website.
• If you submit comments directly (not through a stakeholder organisation), the Committee will still consider your comments when revising the guideline, but will not respond to them or publish them on the website.
• The developer cannot consider any comments that arrive after the deadline, or are not on the comments form.
• Two weeks before publication, we will send the final guideline, comments and responses from the Developer, and the final equality assessment to registered stakeholder organisations that submit comments during this consultation (or send an email to indicate ‘no comment'). This step is to allow stakeholders to tell us about any substantive errors before publication. The guideline will be released only to registered stakeholders who have agreed to the NICE confidentiality acknowledgement and undertaking.

Progress of this guideline topic so far.

Please note: We reserve the right to summarise and edit comments received during consultations, or not to publish them at all, if we consider the comments are too long, or publication would be unlawful or otherwise inappropriate.

Comments received during our consultations are published in the interests of openness and transparency, and to promote understanding of how recommendations are developed. The comments are published as a record of the comments we received, and are not endorsed by NICE, its officers or advisory Committees.