ABSTRACT
Working at NICE in these early years had all the excitement of a start-up company, plus challenging scientific and ethical problems, and (often unwelcome) media attention. Tension points like NICE evaluations of drugs such as Relenza and Herceptin show an organisation designing its processes under fire, and negotiating its role in the medicines world. To a surprising extent, this period laid out the lines along which NICE has since developed. NICE’s work also took on international dimensions. We consider the extent to which NICE owed its early success to the qualities of its leaders.
NICE thrived by keeping a complex group of stakeholders sufficiently happy. These included pharma, doctors and their medical Royal Colleges, other health care workers, government and the media. (Patient groups and the general public are covered in Chapter 5.) NICE has had a substantial impact on professional practice, and also stimulated the growth of health economics (within academia and in the life sciences industry).
