COMMENT
“What’s been really good about setting those criteria is seeing how keen external producers of guidance – particularly the Royal Colleges and professional societies – have been to work with us to meet those standards. One of the reasons for introduc- ing the accreditation scheme, the secondary aim, was to drive up the standard of guid- ance production.
“We’ve got NICE guidance, which people generally accept is high quality, but there was a lot of uncertainty about the rest, and this has been a mechanism whereby we’ve really seen an improvement in the quality of production of guidance from elsewhere.
“It’s important because NICE can never do everything, and it’s important, in setting quality standards for the future, that we’ve got those other resources, because we need to draw on products from Royal Colleges and other bodies to inform those quality standards.”
Feedback
Individual clinicians obviously make plenty of use of NHS Evidence – but they can also play their part in improving the facility and information available.
Dr Leng explained: “We have a regular mechanism of prioritising user research, so we involve clinicians and other groups within those user research projects. At least once a month, we do specific user research pieces of work, and we’re always asking for participants.
“We also have an online facility for people to respond. We use clinicians increasingly in identifying important new evidence and in helping us to comment on that new evi- dence. We are rolling out, in the next 6-12 months, a much more comprehensive sys- tem to highlight important new evidence and to comment on the evidence that might impact on practice. We are very much look- ing to work with clinicians to help inform that.”
Clearly the NHS is not just about its clini- cal staff, and NHS Evidence does also have resources relevant to managers, executives and administrators: but there is progress to be made there, Dr Leng admits.
“We do look at evidence that relates to management and evidence that relates to commissioning, and we do pour all that into NHS Evidence. We think we need to do some further work with those groups to make sure it’s presented and accessible in ways that they would recognise.
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pathway format, which is really quite novel. We’re also looking at mapping public health interventions specifically on NHS Evidence so that public health practitioners can see which things work and which things don’t.
“Finally, there are plans to develop a Public Health England portal that is going to cover all sorts of information, not just evidence: data about population, statistics, and so on. We are working with that team to feed in the evidence to the wider Public Health England portal.
“We launched the first pathway in May this year and we’re hoping to have done the ma- jority of NICE guidance by about November next year, and to then build on that presen- tation of NICE guidance for the future.
“We’ve got to the point where there’s about 800 individual pieces of guidance and it’s too difficult for us to find our way around it, let alone other people.
“We’ve got to focus on an integrated path- way presentation for the future, and that gives us an opportunity, through that digi- tal formatting of the guidance, to link into other external systems as well.”
“We’ve been putting NICE guidance into pathway format, accessible on the NICE website as well as through NHS Evidence. “That’s in response to knowing that com- missioners do like a pathway presentation of evidence. We’re going to roll that out with all of the NICE guidance, and then think about how we link to other resources that commissioners might also find useful to that pathway presentation.”
Keeping up
Like every other part of the NHS, NHS Evi- dence will find its work is affected by the re- forms under the Health & Social Care Bill, and shift from SHAs and PCTs to clinical commissioners.
Dr Leng explained: “We’re being very sensi- tive to the changes that are happening and we’ve got a field team at NICE making sure that we’re regularly talking to the people involved at a local level, making sure that what we are doing is relevant. We need to make sure what we’re doing is particularly relevant to the commissioning audience; that’s probably the most important thing to consider. There’s also lots of national links that we need to consider – Public Health England, for example, what do they need?
“We’ve got a big public health work pro- gramme at NICE, we’ve got public health resources on NHS Evidence, and we’re put- ting the NICE public health guidance into
Tech-savvy
As the NHS changes, so does technology, and because NHS Evidence is a technology- based portal, keeping up with it is a “really important area of development”, Dr Leng said.
“We’ve got a programme up and running this year to develop apps for both iPads and smartphones. There’s such a lot of material on the NICE website and on NHS Evidence that we need to prioritise a range of differ- ent apps because the feedback is that peo- ple don’t like apps that try to do too much.
“You can obviously get the NICE website and NHS Evidence on mobile devices, but there’s a lot of material on there which can make it more tricky to use. So the apps are focusing on priority areas – one of those is going to be medicines information, path- ways and guidance.”
The launch of NHS Evidence has had a huge impact on the work of NICE more widely, Dr Leng concluded: “Having NHS Evidence as a facility has very much sup- ported and moved forward how we present NICE guidance. NICE started off in a paper world – it’s changed such a lot.”
FOR MORE INFORMATION
www.evidence.nhs.uk www.nice.org.uk
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