Monday, September 19, 2016

Health Wonk Treat: History of NICE in the UK (open access; 200 pp)

For real health wonks who love to track the history and trends in policy assessment - see a nearly 200 page, open access book called, "A Terrible Beauty: A Short History of NICE," the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the U.K.   Get it as a PDF book, here.

For an essay at the UK philanthropy Kings Fund, on the book, see here.

The authors are Nicholas Timmins, Sir Michael Rawlins, and John Appleby.  Timmins writes and blogs at Health Affairs (here, here, here) and is an editor at Financial Times (here).  Rawlins, who I had the chance to share a panel with once, was the long time head of NICE and wrote an agile and entertaining book about health tech assessments, Therapeutics, Evidence, and Decision Making 2011, here.  See also Rawlins' deft analysis and prose in his 2008 Harvey Oration, 54pp, here.