NICE Listens

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance and advice on promoting high quality health, public health and social care. Our role is to improve outcomes for people using the NHS and other public health and social care services. We do this by: • Producing evidence-based guidance and advice for health, public health and social care practitioners. • Developing quality standards and performance metrics for those providing and commissioning health, public health and social care services. • Providing a range of information services for commissioners, practitioners and managers across the spectrum of health and social care.

NICE and its advisory bodies base their conclusions on the best available evidence but they also have to make judgements. These fall into two categories. Scientific value judgements are concerned with interpreting the significance and relevance of the totality of the available scientific, technical and clinical data. Social value judgements take account of societal aspirations, preferences and ethical principles that ought to underpin the manner and extent of the care provided to NHS patients and users of social care services.

The advisory groups who formulate the various forms of NICE guidance are well-qualified to make scientific judgements. However, they have no particular legitimacy to impose their own social value judgements on the NHS or social care.

In the past the NICE Citizens Council provided a mechanism for in-depth, deliberative enquiry with a group of informed members of the public, to help inform the approach and judgements NICE takes. Reports from the Citizens Council have been used to inform the NICE Principles and are reflected in our evaluation methods and decision frameworks.

NICE and the wider health and social care landscape are changing. In addition to the long-term impacts of COVID-19, transformative innovation is underway in healthcare services, technologies and regulatory science, and within NICE itself. These changes will throw up challenging moral, ethical and social value issues that NICE will need to address.

In light of these challenges, NICE has introduced a new process for deliberative public engagement: NICE Listens. Whilst performing a similar function to our previous Citizens Council, it offers a more flexible format which can be tailored to different topics and timescales. It complements our existing mechanisms for public engagement but is used to address particularly challenging topics.

NICE is seeking an independent external contractor to support the recruitment for, design, set-up, facilitation and evaluation of a NICE Listens event. NICE staff will work with the successful contractor to design and develop the event.