ABSTRACT
National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) was established in April 1999, to provide guidance to patients and health professionals in England and Wales on the clinical and cost effectiveness of selected technologies and other health interventions. The Institute does this through undertaking health technology appraisals, commissioning clinical guidelines, and funding clinical audit at a national level. NICE also provides funding for a range of effective practice publications. NICE’S challenge is to bring together these guidance authoring and audit responsibilities in ways which will leverage maximum incremental improvement in the quality of care available through the NHS. In doing so, NICE will help to populate the evidence landscape on which clinical governance relies. NHS organisations are finding that much of clinical governance is an evolution of the systems, structures and performance measurement that they already had, to a greater or lesser extent, put in place.
