The strategy: 6 months on

A great start

Our strategy sets out our ambition to continue to improve health and wellbeing by putting science and evidence at the heart of health and care decision making. All while keeping ahead of the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

Of course, it’s a 5-year strategy and we’re only in the very early stages of taking it forward. But, so far, Gill is really pleased with how everything is going.

Gill is really pleased with how the strategy work is progressing so far

“I just need to say ‘thank you’ to all the staff who are working so hard to bring the strategy to life,” she smiles. “Writing a strategy is a bit like writing a guideline. It’s not easy by any stretch of the imagination! But it’s the implementation of the strategy, like the implementation of our guidance, that’s the real challenge.”

Gill is really pleased with how the strategy work is progressing so far

A surgeon in a face mask using a digital x-ray machine

Our methods and processes are a key part of delivering the strategy

Pillar 1: rapid, robust and responsive technology evaluation

Obviously, our methods and processes consultation, which closed on Wednesday 13 October, is fundamental to this pillar. By improving our methods and processes, we aim to ensure we can assess new drugs, devices, diagnostics and digital technologies more quickly, where appropriate, and provide fairer access in the NHS. This will also improve the way we work with patients, the NHS and the life sciences industry.

Our methods and processes are a key part of delivering the strategy

“It’s great to see that the second consultation has been so well received,” Gill says. “This has been a really comprehensive review of all the methods and processes we use.”

Digital technologies

Looking to the future, a key part of this work will be reviewing our methods for evaluating digital technologies.

“For me, the initial success under pillar 1 is launching our Office for Digital Health,” Gill confirms. “This will give us a ‘front door’ so that people externally know where to go to find out about what we’re doing in the evaluation of digital products.”

There are also several other workstreams underway to further develop our capabilities in this area. These include:

testing a new model of contingent approval in addition to our existing pipeline of digital health technologies being evaluated
working with NHSX to establish a reimbursement model
working with the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and others to simplify regulatory processes and support the industry
methodological development work on how to assess the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

You can find out more in our September board papers, in the report from our executive team.

A microscopic view of the COVID-19 virus

The work we did on COVID-19 gave us a great model for the future of integrated guidelines

Pillar 2: dynamic, living guideline recommendations

The most exciting development in this pillar is, of course, our work on our guidelines. Previously named the integrated guidance project, this work is now called the interactive guidelines experience.

“Living guideline recommendations have been absolutely exemplified by the work we’ve done on COVID-19 guidelines,” Gill acknowledges. “That’s given us a great model for the future. And our partners – in particular, the Royal College of General Practitioners – have been very complimentary about the way that it’s been done. They really appreciated being able to engage and collaborate with us to help keep those guidelines up to date.”

The work we did on COVID-19 gave us a great model for the future of integrated guidelines

Of course, to have dynamic living guidelines, we’ll need to have an easily modifiable digital platform. Something that allows us to easily update the evidence and the recommendations accordingly.

“We’re currently testing the MAGICapp guideline authoring tool as an option,” Gill explains. “The technical evaluation will help us confirm whether or not MAGICapp is the best solution for us.”

Pillar 3: effective guidance uptake to maximise our impact

The high quality of our guidance and advice is internationally respected. But, if our guidance is not used effectively by the health and social care system, then it cannot help people.

“We want to really engage with the system to talk about how our guidance is implemented and to understand any barriers,” Gill explains. “So, we hosted a round table event on Thursday 23 September.

This event was really helpful in clarifying what would be useful for the system.

"We agreed that a simple statement setting out what NICE does - and, most importantly, why that matters - would be very helpful," Gill reveals. "That might include talking about how the Care Quality Commission uses our guidelines in their inspections. Or how the General Medical Council uses our advice in malpractice cases. Or even how Health Education England builds our recommendations into training packages.

"So, watch this space!"

A clinical researcher in full PPE, looking through a microscope

We want to improve how we use real world data in our work

Pillar 4: leadership in data, research and science

There are 2 pieces of work in this pillar that Gill is particularly enthusiastic about. One is the first version of our real world evidence framework.

“Over the next few months, we'll host a series of round tables with external stakeholders, NICE evidence review groups and committee members so we can develop this further,” Gill explains. “But it’s basically all about how we use real world data in our work. I think it’s really exciting!”

We want to improve how we use real world data in our work

The other piece of work also centres around evidence. “We’ve agreed a citable publications platform for publishing our evidence reviews,” Gill confirms.

“We’ve chosen to work with NCBI Bookshelf, which is part of PubMed. All our evidence reviews from 2016 onwards will be hosted on their new citable publications platform,” she informs us.

“This is really important work,” Gill continues. “The platform also contains all our guidelines content. But publishing our evidence reviews as well adds real value to the work of external researchers and guidance producers around the world. And it’s important for the organisations who have produced the reviews for us to have their work recognised.”

Adapting to deliver the strategy

We’ve also been working hard to adapt the organisation itself so we can better deliver the strategy. An important development in this has been the approval of the Digital Workplace business case and the appointment of an implementation partner, Civica.

“This means we can now really begin to make progress in improving our technology and digitising our processes,” Gill confirms. “In particular, I’m really looking forward to the roll out of MS Office 365.”

There's a lot of work going on across the organisation at the moment. So, we’ve also been looking at what additional capacity we need to better support our people.

“We’ll be bringing in new executive roles that will give us extra capacity,” Gill explains. “We’ve already appointed an interim chief people officer, Nicole Gee. Nicole’s role is key and will be very much focussed on helping and supporting our transformation and organisational design work.”

And we're doing some great work around recognising staff who live our values.

“I’ve been really impressed with our new staff values awards,” Gill smiles. “There have been some lovely nominations, I’ve really enjoyed reading them.

“And, of course, we’ve also done some excellent work to reinvigorate our equality and diversity group. Which gives us the opportunity to have broader representation across the organisation in this very important area.”

A circle of joined hands, featuring people from many difference races

We'll deliver the strategy, working together

Thank you!

The strategy has been really well received externally and has had a huge amount of support from all parties, from professional organisations to industry bodies. For Gill, though, the most impressive thing about the work done so far is the support from staff.

We'll deliver the strategy, working together

“We’ve had a really challenging time,” Gill acknowledges. “I’m so proud of all our staff and how they’ve adapted to remote working during a pandemic. Managing the day job and also giving all their energy and enthusiasm to delivering the new work to support the strategy so well.

“We simply cannot deliver this without staff commitment, so it’s something I really do appreciate.”

Onwards and upwards!

The next 6 months is all set out in our business plan.

“Basically, we’ll be taking all the strategy work forward, and also starting to plan in next year’s work,” Gill explains. “We’ll need to agree a prioritisation process with the board. And also with staff, so we can work out which are the next most important parts of the strategy to start work on next year.”

It's onwards and upwards for NICE as we continue to deliver on our strategic objectives

Got a question?

“If anyone has any questions about the strategy,” Gill says, “they are more than welcome to contact me. Or they can contact whoever is the most relevant director for the workstream they’re asking about.”

You can find out more on the strategy page of NICE Space.