NICE in 2025:
Helping to get the best care to people fast
An end-of-year summary from NICE’s chief executive, Dr Sam Roberts
Delivering on our commitments to patients, the NHS and taxpayers
Dr Sam Roberts, chief executive of NICE
Dr Sam Roberts, chief executive of NICE
I’ve been honoured to serve as chief executive of NICE, an organisation that I’ve admired for decades.
I joined NICE in February 2022 as we were emerging from the COVID pandemic. Up to that point, we had enjoyed a world-leading reputation in supporting evidence-based decisions in health and care.
But it was clear that health and care was rapidly evolving, with increasing pressures on the health service and new types of innovation emerging. If NICE was to meet the needs of the patients, clinicians and commissioners of the future we needed to transform too - to become more relevant, timely, usable and impactful.
In 2022 we launched our transformation plan and focused on delivering real outcomes across the system.
We’re committed to getting care to people fast and we’ve been laser focussed on improving our timeliness.
As a result, we now publish guidance 26% faster for medicines and 11% faster for healthtech.
As the NHS moves from analogue to digital, we’ve shifted our energies to expand our portfolio of guidance on health technologies, including diagnostics, devices and digital.
Our healthtech programme is now more than 30 times bigger than it was in 2022.
This transformational work meant that we were in a strong position to start delivery on the government's 10 Year Plan, which was announced in July 2025.
NICE’s commitments in the 10 Year Plan
The 10 Year Plan expanded NICE’s remit in 3 key areas, enabling us to:
Provide faster, fairer rollout of high impact healthtech.
Keep guidance up to date to drive smarter spending
Make parallel decisions for faster medicines access.
Faster, fairer rollout of high impact healthtech
The way we treat illness is changing. Technology is opening up new ways to care for patients, diagnose conditions earlier, and help people stay healthier for longer.
But too often, these innovations are rolled out unevenly. Through the 10 Year Plan we're empowered to help reduce this postcode lottery in access to healthtech.
Our new approach will help ensure that high-impact healthtech that meets the NHS’s most urgent needs, will be reimbursed and made available across the NHS - in a similar way to our medicines programme.
Recent milestones include:
- In September and October, we invited our partners and stakeholders to consult on changes to the existing health technology appraisal manual.
- We expect to announce the first topics to use the pathway in January 2026, following ministerial approval.
Keeping guidance up to date to drive smarter spending
Our whole life cycle approach will help the NHS stay up to date with best practice. We will maintain up-to-date guidance reflecting changes in evidence, costs, and clinical practice.
We will keep reviewing the evidence as it grows, so that NHS care remains focused on what benefits patients most.
Some of our achievements so far:
- We published final guidance recommending abiraterone. As a generic treatment, abiraterone is set to benefit thousands of people and save the NHS millions of pounds.
- Recently, we updated our guidance on heart failure to recommend that patients receive medicines earlier in the clinical pathway, potentially preventing around 3,000 deaths and 5,500 hospital admissions each year.
- In August, we announced the biggest shake-up in type-2 diabetes care in a decade. This work, to re-evaluate priority clinical pathways, is set to benefit millions of people.
Making parallel decisions for faster medicines access
By April 2026, better alignment between NICE and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) will enable us to bring medicines to patients 3 to 6 months sooner.
Recent achievements include:
- On 1 October 2025, the new aligned pathway between NICE and MHRA opened for a small number of early adopters, elected by both organisations.
- Between October 2025 and April 2026, NICE and MHRA will be conducting further user research to help shape and rigorously test the pathway, prior to expansion to cover all new medicines from April 2026.
- The first topic is expected to publish in February 2026 and over 30 medicines are scheduled to the aligned pathway.
Transforming to meet the needs of the system
During the past year, we have continued to progress the priorities of our transformation plan, by making sure we are more relevant, timely, usable and impactful.
We have made important headway in each of these areas.
Relevance: focusing on what matters most
We must be strategic in deciding which topics we prioritise, to ensure we’re focusing on areas that have the greatest impact on the health and care system.
Keeping focus in 2025, we’ve:
- undertaken a full update of our Forward View, ensuring our work is aligned to the priorities of the 10 Year Plan
- identified over 100 use-cases for AI technology in the NHS, of those 100, 28 have been triaged and testing is expected to start on 2 before the end of December 2025
- continued to help address health inequalities through approving a groundbreaking one-off gene therapy for severe sickle cell disease and updating our methods to improve the way we take account of health inequalities in guidance production
- been nominated for a prestigious Prix Galien Award for our committee’s work in helping to reduce health inequalities.
Timeliness: helping to get the best care to people fast
We’re continuing to help get effective, innovative treatments to patients faster than ever before.
This year, we’re:
- in the top quartile in Europe for speed – which is broadly consistent with previous years’ performance
- using agreed processes to improve our timeliness. We reduced our appraisal time by 5 weeks when approving darolutamide for treating prostate cancer. By using a cost comparison approach, this treatment is available to 6,000 patients sooner.
Usability: ensuring our guidance is useful and usable
We work hard to make sure our guidance is up to date, practical and accessible. We've now implemented a consistent and structured approach to creating new recommendations, making our guidance more usable.
This year:
- 80% of our users reported that NICE guidance is usable, with work to further improve the user experience of our content ongoing
- our new sepsis guideline targets faster, tailored treatments to benefit patients.
Impactful: making a difference to the health and care system
Once our guidance is published, it is important that it is implemented by our colleagues in the wider system.
In 2025, we have helped foster the implementation of our guidance through:
- actively engaging with the health and care system to evolve our uptake and adoption support. We held engagement events with integrated care boards in the 7 system regions to discuss our priorities and understand how we can support their focus on strategic commissioning. We also launched an integrated care board reference panel to guide our work
- increased impact of our guidance, by embedding our guidance into CVDPrevent’s processes and helping them to share GP practice audit insights that are aligned to our cardiovascular guideline recommendations.
Direction set for 2026 and beyond
On Monday 1 December, the government announced that it will increase the thresholds NICE uses in evaluations of new medicines to decide if they should be used in the NHS.
In a health service funded by general taxation it is right that government decides on the level of health spend in the UK. The newly agreed thresholds aim to support the life sciences sector and broader economy.
NICE's global reputation for robust, rigorous, transparent guidance will not change as we work with independent committees to apply the new value for money thresholds in their deliberations from April 2026.
New leadership, continued mission
I’m delighted that Professor Jonathan Benger has been appointed as my successor to lead NICE into its next chapter. Jonathan’s clinical background, national policy experience and deep understanding of the challenges facing the health and care system make him the ideal person for this role.
Thank you
As I prepare to hand over to Jonathan, I do so knowing that NICE's future is in excellent hands. This is a remarkable organisation, and I am confident it will continue to flourish with the support of our talented staff and strong leadership from the board.
My sincere thanks go to all who have contributed to NICE's achievements: the chairman, the board, and our independent committee members whose expertise has been invaluable. I am equally grateful to our partners, the practitioners, commissioners, patient representatives, and industry colleagues, whose collaboration has been essential to our success.
Most importantly, I want to thank my colleagues at NICE. You have shown throughout my tenure that you can rise to new challenges whilst staying true to our values and core purpose. I have every confidence that you will continue to deliver our strategic priorities and fulfil our commitments in the 10 Year Plan. As NICE enters its next chapter, I’ll remain a life-long champion and cheerleader of our work, watching from the wings with pride and respect.
Dr Sam Roberts, chief executive of NICE
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