Introducing a new way of prioritising our guidance topics

For 25 years NICE has acted as a trusted guide in health and care.

We’ve provided health and care practitioners and commissioners with advice on the most clinically and cost-effective treatments, drugs, innovations and procedures in health and care.

Over that time, we’ve accumulated a huge suite of guidance. We’ve developed more than 25,000 guideline recommendations in total. In a typical year, we produce around 90 technology appraisals along with guidance on around 80 medtech or interventional procedure topics. And once our guidance is published, we continually review it, to ensure it’s up to date and that it reflects the latest and best available evidence.

Through this work we’ve gained a reputation as an organisation known for its independence, transparency and rigour.

But the health and care system has changed dramatically since we began. New, and potentially transformative, technologies are emerging at an increasing rate. The amount of data available has grown exponentially. And we know that colleagues in the health and care system continue to face unprecedented capacity and workforce pressures.

This is what makes it so important that we prioritise our topics effectively; to maintain our capacity and ensure we focus on the areas that matter most in health and care.

We must ensure that we create and update guidance on the topics that make the biggest difference to people, that have the greatest impact on the system, and that will help reduce the negative effects of health inequalities.

So, we have developed a new approach to prioritisation. This approach will put us in a much better position when choosing topics. It will help us achieve our core strategic ambition of focusing on what matters most. And it will make sure we prioritise the areas that have the most benefit and greatest impact on health and care.

A new approach to prioritisation

Before this new approach, we prioritised guidance through several different methods of topic selection.

We have now integrated and unified these processes. This means we’ll be able to produce guidance in a way that’s more coordinated, efficient and reduces the risk of duplication.

We have achieved this by developing a new prioritisation framework and launching a new prioritisation board.

The prioritisation board drives our decision-making, ensuring we focus on the right topics. It is made up of senior members of NICE and maintains oversight of our guidance portfolio.

The board reviews and discusses topics to ensure that our guidance reflects national priorities for health and care in line with our principles. And it ensures the topics we prioritise are aligned with the national priorities of the health and care system.

The prioritisation board met for the first time on 29 May. View our prioritisation decisions.

All board decisions are based around a common prioritisation framework. This framework is applied to all topics and products considered by NICE in a consistent and transparent way, aside from medicines where our statutory duties remain unchanged.

We've published a NICE-wide topic prioritisation manual that fully sets out the process by which guidance topics and updates are identified, prioritised, and routed by NICE. It also describes the decision-making framework used by the NICE prioritisation board.

Forward view: setting out our priorities for 2024/25

This week, we published the first major milestone from our work on prioritisation, our forward view. This web resource gives you a summary of our priorities for the coming year. It highlights the topics we have in development and outlines our reasons for prioritising them.

The forward view also describes what we see as emerging national trends in health and care. These are areas that we expect to have an impact on health technologies and policy in the next 2 to 5 years.

The development of our new prioritisation process and our forward view are important steps for NICE as we transform as an organisation. Together, they will ensure we are providing you with guidance on the topics of greatest importance in the health and care. And they will help you to meet the opportunities and challenges of an evolving health and care landscape.

For further information about our prioritisation process please email topics@nice.org.uk.