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HEALTH
National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence
The Minister of State, Department of Health (Jane Kennedy): Today I am pleased to announce the launch of the consultation on new proposals to update the topic selection process for the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence's work programme. As NICE's role has changed in the last 12 months and the institute has taken on its new public health responsibilities, it is the right time to look at changes to the process of topic selection.
Topic selection is a critical part of the process of producing guidance. Deciding what questions we want to ask NICE on the clinical and cost effectiveness of treatments is often a good deal harder than getting the answers and no less important. It is therefore vital that the mechanisms we have in place for the selection of topics produce the questions on issues of real priority to the NHS and in the public health arena.
While the existing process has served well over the past four years, topic selection needs to keep with pace with changes in both the NHS and NICE. We need the process to be more responsive and have more NHS and public health representation to ensure the topics going to NICE are the ones where advice is most needed. At the same time, the selection of public health topics must also be fully integrated into the new process so any impact these topics might have on the institute's other work programmes can be identified.
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The consultation will begin on 6 March 2006 and ends on 9 June 2006. Copies of the consultation documents will be available in the Library and on the Department of Health website at
http://www.dh.gov.uk/Consultations/ LiveConsultations/LiveConsultationsArticle/fs/ en?CONTENT–ID=4131055&chk=7xp%2Bnk. All comments on the consultation should be sent to responsesniceconsultation@dh.gsi.gov.uk.
HOME DEPARTMENT
Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Andy Burnham): The Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 makes provision for the use of animals for education and training. In considering project licence applications for education and training, the Home Office defines education as the transfer of knowledge or the ability to formulate and test hypotheses, and training as the development or maintenance of manual skills.
In practice, project licences for training purposes have been issued only for the training of practising surgeons in micro-vascular techniques, when applicants could demonstrate that no alternative methods could achieve the specific training objectives. However, the 1986 Act does not prohibit the authorisation of projects for training in other manual techniques and applications for other categories of training in manual skills can be considered. After very careful consideration, the Home Office has recently granted a licence under the 1986 Act to train a small number of personal licensees in a specialist injection technique to enable progress to be made towards developing and introducing a novel test method that will allow a particular therapeutic product to be evaluated using a mouse model rather than the currently used non-human primate model. I am satisfied that this animal use is justified as an exception to our general policy that licences will usually only be granted for training in micro-vascular techniques and that the requisite level of technical competence could not be obtained by other means.
The exception made is specific to this application and programme of animal use. It is not intended as a broader change in policy on this issue.