Published 23 February 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b772
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b772

News

High Court rules that NICE process lacked transparency

Clare Dyer

1 BMJ

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

A drug company has won a High Court ruling that the processes of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) lack transparency. NICE will have to reconsider its guidelines for treatments to prevent fractures in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis.

Mr Justice Holman said that the advisory body on drug spending in the NHS in England and Wales had merely gone "through the motions so they could claim they had done their duty" in trying to get consent to disclose confidential material to the company and patient groups.

Servier Laboratories, which makes the drug strontium ranelate (Protelos), challenged guidance that it said unfairly restricted access to the treatment for NHS patients.

NICE had refused to disclose the full economic model on which its cost-benefit analysis had been based because it included risk equations, coefficients, and other data owned by John Kanis, director of the World Health Organization’s collaborating centre . . . [Full text of this article]


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