Select Committee on Health Minutes of Evidence


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 physician—they still let me practise a little—and 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published and I think you heard from Dr Kendal a few weeks again of his paper in The Lancet comparing the published and unpublished trials of SSRIs.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 rights—and I am sure in legal terms that is right—but 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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