Guidelines and Economic Evaluation for Cancer
About Us
We are a recently established team of health economists working as part of a collaboration between the Health Services Research Unit (HSRU) based at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSTHM) and the National Collaborating Centre for Cancer (NCC-C) to develop clinical guidelines commissioned by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
NICE has established several independent national collaborating centres (NCCs) to help develop the clinical guidelines by harnessing the expertise of the Royal Medical Colleges, NHS trusts, professional bodies and patient/carer organisations. The National Collaborating Centre for Cancer is hosted by Velindre NHS Trust in Cardiff and is responsible for developing guidelines for the NHS in England and Wales on treating and caring for people with cancer.
NICE is committed to producing clinical guidelines based on the best available evidence of both clinical and cost effectiveness. The team at LSHTM provide technical support alongside the team in Cardiff to the guideline development process and have a key role in encouraging each guideline development group (GDG) to use evidence of cost-effectiveness when making recommendations.
Our role in the guideline process as health economists is outlined in detail in the NICE guideline manual. We are involved at every stage of the guideline development process, from the initial scoping of a guideline through to writing the health economic sections which form part of the final guideline document. We are responsible for completing the Economic Plan which justifies the selection of topics requiring economic analysis, based on systematic consideration of the potential value of economic analysis across all guideline questions. We attend all the guideline development group meetings where as well as presenting information relevant to the health economic priority topics we have a more general role to advise on economic aspects of all the clinical issues or questions. Outside of the GDG meetings we work closely with the information specialists at the NCC-C and from the searches they provide we identify and review published economic evidence relevant to the guideline, with detailed critical appraisal of selected papers. In addition we develop health economic models for selected topics where published evidence of cost-effectiveness is absent, incomplete or not relevant to the NHS perspective.
