NICE in 2024:
Highlights from our 25th year
An end-of-year summary from NICE's chief executive,
Dr Sam Roberts
Building on our 25-year history
Dr Sam Roberts, chief executive of NICE
Dr Sam Roberts, chief executive of NICE
As 2024 draws to a close, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment within health and care.
Countries across the globe are grappling with a crucial challenge: how to embrace the rapid emergence of innovative health technologies, while ensuring the health and care system remains sustainable and accessible for all.
Here in the UK, the conversation about the future of health and care is well underway.
The NHS’s recent consultation, on creating a 10-year health plan, opened up an important national dialogue. It has enabled patients, communities, practitioners and industry to give voice to a shared vision for the NHS of tomorrow. An NHS that emphasises prevention, is community-orientated, and digitally enabled.
25 years of getting the best care to people fast
This debate has come at a crucial time for the health and care system - where innovations offering great promise are rapidly emerging, while the NHS operates under unprecedented financial pressures.
For NICE, as we mark our 25th anniversary, this challenging environment presents us with an opportunity to reaffirm our crucial role within the system.
Since 1999, NICE has helped get the best care to people fast, at value to the taxpayer. This means that we are often called upon to make difficult decisions, to ensure that only the most clinically and cost-effective treatments are available.
We will continue to make difficult decisions as new medical technologies continue to emerge. Our website is now being regularly updated with explainer pieces, such as this one on how NICE makes decisions, and the values that underpin them.
As we reflect on 2024, I want to express my deep gratitude to everyone who contributes to our vital work - from the members of our independent committees, to system partners, innovators, and NICE’s board and staff.
It is only through your tireless work that rigorous, transparent, evidence-based decisions can be made about what works for patients and what constitutes good value to the taxpayer.
Building a NICE fit for the next 25 years
During 2024, we’ve marked our 25th anniversary by reflecting, with our partners and collaborators, on the many ways that NICE has helped the health and care system.
While we’re proud of these achievements, our focus as an organisation is how we can continue to adapt so that we are fit for the future. We will maintain our reputation for rigorous and independent decision-making. But we will focus on being more:
- Timely
- Relevant
- Usable
- Impactful.
Looking back at our highlights of the past 12 months, it’s clear that we’ve made important strides across these areas of focus.
Timeliness: helping to get the best care to people fast
We are helping get effective, innovative treatments to patients faster than ever before.
This year we have:
- Improved the timeliness of our medicines’ appraisals by 17% and of our health tech appraisals by 19%.
- Helped England become the 5th-fastest country in Europe for making new health technologies available after regulatory approval.
- Published positive guidance within 24 hours of marketing authorisation on 2 occasions.
- Published research which shows that our NICE Advice service can reduce appraisal timelines by nearly 3 months, leading to a shorter time from marketing authorisation to the publication of NICE guidance.
We also celebrated the landmark publication of our 1000th technology appraisal. Of those published, 84% have been positive, recommending clinical and cost-effective treatments for use on the NHS.
While it took us 18 years to publish the first 500 appraisals, we’ve doubled the total in the last 6 years.
Relevance: focussing on what matters most
In 2024, we established a new prioritisation board to ensure we’re focussing on the areas that have the greatest impact on the health and care system.
Through the board, we published our first ever forward view, which highlights the areas we are prioritising over the coming year.
Helping the NHS adopt digital health technologies and genomics
To support the NHS’s pivot to a prevention-orientated, digitally enabled service, we have increased our focus on digital health at NICE:
- Our digital health programme is now more than 30 times bigger than it was in 2021-22, with 100 digital technologies evaluated this year, including treatments for chronic tic disorders and Tourette syndrome.
- We have recommended technologies that can help diagnose attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children and young people.
- We have helped design a digital ‘one-stop-shop' for asthma alongside the British Thoracic Society and the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network that can support practitioners in diagnosing and treating people with asthma.
The arrival of genomics medicine brings great promise and the potential to transform our understanding of health and care.
We have more than 2 decades of experience in this area, most recently recommending a genetic test that can offer personal care to people who have had a stroke. We are now building on this by partnering with NHS England on a national genomics pathway.
Usability: ensuring our guidance is useful and usable
Our guidance has been downloaded more than 11.5 million times this year. But we know that more can be done to make sure it is up to date, practical and accessible.
We’re bringing together our guidance by topic so that it’s all in one place and easy to find. This means we’re including our published technology appraisals in our guidelines – making it easier to view and decide on treatment options. We’ve included 100 technology appraisals into guidelines so far.
Behind the scenes, we are developing a new, structured and consistent way of delivering our guideline recommendations. This will ensure they are more easily understood by practitioners and commissioners, and can be read by machines.
In the summer, we launched our new improved corporate website. This has seen the number of users accessing our site for guidance has increased by 22% year-on-year.
Impactful: making a difference to the health and care system
Once our guidance is published, it is important that it is then implemented by our colleagues in the health and care system.
New research on statins highlighted one example of how the adoption of our guidance is benefitting patients and contributing to reduced operational NHS pressures, by prioritising prevention.
The research, published in October, found that the largest number of people on record (5.3 million) are now benefitting from NICE-recommended statins to reduce heart attacks and strokes following our updated guidance.
This is the biggest annual increase since 2016/17. It coincides with the introduction of new cholesterol indicators in the GP Quality and Outcomes Framework and the release last year of updated NICE guidance on cardiovascular disease.
Stories from patients and practitioners
While these figures demonstrate our reach, it's the individual stories that truly show the human impact of our work.
Let me share just two examples that highlight the real-world difference our guidance makes.
In July, we published Ammaarah Ahmed's story. Ammaarah told us how our guidance on game-changing technology for type 1 diabetes has transformed her life. In her own words, she says "It feels like you've given me a new pancreas. It is my lifeline".
Later in the year, we heard from Clatterbridge Cancer Centre on improving care and survival rates for people with spinal cancer. They have improved early detection rates of metastatic spinal cord compression, and increased average survival rates from 30 days to 7 months by following our recommendations.
Thank you
I’d like to finish by passing on my deepest thanks to our system partners and our independent committees for the rigour and expertise they provide in helping us deliver our guidance.
I am immensely grateful to our staff at NICE, our chairman and our board. NICE’s achievements this year could only have happened through their continued commitment, passion and dedication.
I wish you a peaceful festive season and a happy 2025.
Dr Sam Roberts, chief executive of NICE
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