NICE enables groups and organisations to work together on their response to our online public consultations

Ensuring everyone can take part in our public consultations is core to NICE’s work.

It enables NICE’s committees to do their job in producing evidence-based recommendations for the NHS.

This open approach to consultation on our recommendations puts committees in a better position to understand if and how their initial decision may need to change.

Our online comment collection service enables anyone to comment on some of NICE’s guidance consultations online.

When the system was first launched only one person from an organisation could submit comments. If several people from the same organisation wanted to comment, one person would have to manually collate their comments from different sources, e.g. email and word documents,  outside the system before submitting them.

In feedback we have been told that we needed to have a way for people across an organisation to collaborate online on a joint response.

So, we have developed functionality enabling multiple people to add comments online to an organisation-wide response to NICE. We are piloting this on selected consultations.

To enable this functionality, we are introducing:

• new sign-in options so the system can tell if you are commenting as an individual, as a representative of or as part of an organisation

• the role of a commenting lead who reviews one set of combined comments and submits a joint response on a piece of guidance on behalf of an organisation (to find out more read our article on becoming a commenting lead)

• commenting codes that can be shared with people within an organisation to give them access to a submission. Only the commenting lead can submit the final version of the organisation’s formal response to NICE.

The organisational commenting process is driven by the commenting lead. A lead can manage one or more consultations simultaneously.

The lead will generate a unique commenting code on the NICE comment collection system for each consultation that they want to manage in this way. They can share the code with colleagues who need to contribute to the organisation’s response. Comments left by colleagues using the code can be combined into a single response to NICE by the lead. Each user can download a copy of their comments if desired. After successfully submitting the final response to NICE, the lead can download all comments as well as the final submission to NICE for their records.

We are exploring several different ways to improve this system. If you would like to provide feedback on this after using the system, you can do this by completing our survey which you will see on successful submission of your response.