A public consultation is now open for the latest White Paper - Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Our strategy for public health in England. Notable among its 100 pages is that NICE is mentioned just twice. A new body – Public Health England – appears to be put in charge of cost-effectiveness issues. Among its tasks, PHE will:
- “ensure that the NICE adds maximum value by providing authoritative, independent advice on the evidence of effectiveness and cost effectiveness for public health interventions, working to specific commissions from Public Health England; and
- develop intelligence about the relative cost effectiveness of different interventions to support DsPH in commissioning local services, building on the work already started by NICE.”
Precisely, how do you ‘develop intelligence about cost-effectiveness’ without someone - such as NICE - doing the research?