Workings of NICE during coronavirus pandemic

Dear Stakeholder

We wanted to update you on how NICE is working to support the NHS and wider health and care sector at this challenging time, and to provide more details on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting our normal ways of working.

During this period of emergency, NICE has adapted its priorities to support the NHS, local authorities and the wider health and social care sector to tackle COVID-19. We will only publish guidance that is therapeutically critical or focused on COVID-19-related issues.

The stakeholders and advisory committees involved in the development of our guidelines include a large number of frontline staff. We know that their priority in this crisis is caring for patients. We do not want to draw them away from this vital work.

For this reason, we have cancelled all guideline committee meetings and we will not be publishing any draft or final guidelines until further notice (except for COVID-19 rapid guidelines – see below).

At present we are not able to confirm the revised timelines for each guideline. We will be in touch to provide further information as soon as possible. For more information in the meantime, please visit our dedicated webpage https://www.nice.org.uk/covid-19

COVID-19 rapid guidelines

We are working closely with NHS England and NHS Improvement to develop rapid guidelines on topics relevant to the management of COVID-19. These will be published weekly and will focus on a range of clinical settings. In addition, we are producing rapid evidence reviews on medicines used to manage COVID-19 and its symptoms.

All of our COVID-19 guidelines and evidence reviews will be published on the NICE website. Enquiries about this work should be sent to [email protected]