BACKGROUND There is international concern that conflicts of interest (COI) may bias clinical guideline development and render it untrustworthy. Guideline COI policies exist with the aim of reducing this bias but it is not known how such policies are interpreted and used by guideline producing organisations. This study sought to determine how conflicts of interest (COIs) are disclosed and manage...

### What you need to know This article summarises the updated National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guideline, Atrial fibrillation: diagnosis management ,1 focusing on three areas where new evidence has led a change in recommendations: bleeding risk prediction, anticoagulation, ablation. We explain Guideline Committee’s rationale these recommendations highlight challenges im...

BACKGROUND The National Health Service (NHS) was tasked in 2001 with developing service provision to prevent falls in older people. We carried out a national survey to provide a description of health and social care funded UK fallers services, and to benchmark progress against current practice guidelines. METHODS Cascade approach to sampling, followed by telephone survey with senior member of...

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has thus far relied on historical data and predominantly industry-sponsored trials to provide evidence for venous thromboembolic (VTE) prophylaxis in joint replacement patients. We argue that the NICE guidelines may be reliant on assumptions that are in need of revision. Following the publication of large scale, independent observ...

This issue of Applied Health Economics and HealthPolicy includes a detailed description of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance, and of its development, on the adoption into practice of the ‘PleurX peritoneal catheter drainage system for vacuumassisted drainage of treatment-resistant, recurrent malignant ascites’. This is the ninth piece of Medical Technolog...

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has been responsible for managing the process of developing new clinical and health improvement indicators for the United Kingdom (UK) Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) and reviewing the current QOF clinical indicator set since April 2009. This paper sets out in detail the NICE-led process for QOF indicator development and des...

BACKGROUND The English Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) initiative aims to make evidence-based psychological therapies for depression and anxiety disorder more widely available in the National Health Service (NHS). 32 IAPT services based on a stepped care model were established in the first year of the programme. We report on the reliable recovery rates achieved by patients tr...

The UK's National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is best known in primary care for its production since 2001 of evidence-based clinical guidelines covering a wide range of clinical conditions. 1 More recently, NICE guidelines have become further integrated into UK primary care through their development into performance measures for the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) payme...