Examination of Witnesses (Questions 878
- 879)
THURSDAY 20 JANUARY 2005
PROFESSOR SIR
MICHAEL RAWLINS
AND MR
ANDREW DILLON
CBE
Q878 Chairman: Colleagues, can I
welcome you to this second session this morning and particularly
welcome our witnesses. We are very pleased to see you again and
thank you for your attendance. Would you briefly introduce yourselves.
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
I am Michael Rawlins and I am Chairman of NICE.
Mr Dillon: I am Andrew Dillon
and I am Chief Executive of NICE.
Q879 Chairman: Before I begin, I
think it is appropriate to say on behalf of the Committee that
we do appreciate your response to the recommendations in our report
some time ago. It is not always that we can say to agencies, "Thank
you for listening to what we had to say and for doing something
about it." I think generally we have been very pleased with
the response and I wanted to place that on the record. Before
we get into some of the detailed questions, could I ask a similar
opening question to the one that I asked at the start of the last
session at which I think you were present which is, what lessons
do you feel may be learned from the evidence that we have received
in this inquiry as it relates to your area of responsibility?
What do you feel are the issues that perhaps we as a committee,
in moving towards the conclusion of this inquiry, ought to be
particularly concentrating on? You have a unique insight into
many of the areas that we have talked about. As a starter, I would
be very interested, Sir Michael, in what your thoughts are on
that.
Professor Sir Michael Rawlins:
Yes and Andrew may have some additional ones. As far as I am concerned,
the part that particularly concerns me, partly as a physicianthey
still let me practise a littleand partly from NICE's point
of view is the public availability of all clinical trials. It
does not just apply to the industry, it applies to people in academia
who do clinical trials too because sometimes they do not get published
or do not get made publicly available and there is overwhelming
evidence to show that it is the negative trials that tend to not
get published and I think you heard from Dr Kendal a few weeks
again of his paper in The Lancet comparing the published
and unpublished trials of SSRIs. That paper incidentally, since
he saw you, has been awarded the "Paper of the Year"
by The Lancet, which is pretty remarkable. So, it is the
public accessibility of the results of all clinical trials. I
know that sometimes people talk about intellectual property rightsand
I am sure in legal terms that is rightbut I am also very
struck by the fact that it is patients who take part in these
studies and we have an obligation to them to learn from what they
have done because being a patient in a trial is inconvenient and
sometimes can he hazardous and we owe it to them to make sure
that their efforts and their discomfort has not been in vain.
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