National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence's Loopholes - Essay Example

Established in 1999, NICE has tackled the notion that health care access is only restricted to particular regions of the world. Thus, one can access health services depending on whether he or she is in a particular part of the world where such services are deemed to be available (Corinna, 2013). Though NICE aims to improve the delivery of health services to the people, it is prone to weaknesses. One such weakness is that NICE takes quite a long time for new drugs to be approved and treatments to be offered to patients with terminal diseases or life-threatening illnesses. This paper explores this challenge in detail. Later, some solutions to this challenge regarding NICE are looked into (Woolf et al., 1999).

NICE has delayed treatments for patients with terminal conditions in many incidences. For instance, in the decision made by NICE in the year 2000 to prevent patients with multiple sclerosis to use beta-interferon (Brown & Summerbel, 2008). According to Godfrey (2007), two years later, NICE was also blamed in the United Kingdom. This was because NICE guidance limited the usage of a drug called imatinib to cases of myeloid leukemia at an advanced stage. Such guidance was released by NICE to health care professionals when the disease had extended to very fatal stages. Another serious delay by NICE regarded therapy for breast cancer. During this incidence, a drug called Herceptin that was supposed to be used to treat early cases of breast cancer was released much later by NICE (Godfrey, 2007). This delayed all the efforts to handle early breast cancer cases.

There are a lot of solutions that can be put in place to tackle this serious weakness of NICE. One of the most useful ones would be to permit technology appraisals recommendations that offer a yes that is restricted (Jones & Kronchmalik, 2007). Such a yes would permit treatments or drugs to be consumed by subsets of patients with specific cases. Another way would be to involve healthcare experts, particularly during formulations of NICE guidelines. Thus, nurses should be more cautious when they review their practices against the guidelines and guidance of NICE.

This is because it is the nurses who provide care to patients using the guidelines of NICE of which are not in line with nursing guidelines. For example, delaying drugs and treatments are not ethical according to nursing guidelines. Hence, nurses need to be available when NICE guidelines are being formulated. This will improve treatment and drug delivery to patients with terminal diseases like breast cancer. Rapid appraisal and tracking of specific conditions can also improve NICE services (Mollon, 2009). This technique can be used by NICE in such a way that the drugs are approved during the licensing stage. This can help prevent the delay unlike when NICE waits until the drugs are licensed that is when approval procedures are begun. This can lead to a faster decision to avail the drugs more quickly when licensing is complete. NICE guidelines need to shift and take a more flexible approach (Lambert, 2007).

This is because inflexible guidelines make it impossible for clinicians to tailor care to patients as the case is when NICE delay drugs that are supposed to be used to treat terminal diseases. NICE should try to limit individualized and reduce variations in recommending drugs to patients (Woolf et al., 1999). This will reduce the treatment costs and time that would be involved in matching a single drug to a patient. Additionally, a costly guideline may make a single service to provide to a patient at the expense of several important services. The powers of the NICE need to be regulated so that they become efficient and accountable to the patients and the health care systems at large. Otherwise, NICE would use a lot of resources but act slowly in availing drugs to fight diseases. This will also ensure that costly resources used by NICE are devoted to more efficient services.

In summary, we realized that despite the fact that NICE has many benefits, it also has great loopholes that need to be looked into. However, the perceptions and controversies surrounding NICE are not constant. The controversies vary from a group to another. However, the delay in releasing drugs with urgency to help in medical provision to the terminal illness seems to be the most serious controversies surrounding NICE. This controversy is perceived to be the most self-serving. Additionally, it is life-threatening and biased to the general public fraternity. The guideline put in place by NICE are incapable of providing proof of adequate expertise to the publics in a health care system. Thus, a general rule would be to integrate the solutions suggested above to ensure an efficient NICE that looks into the needs of patients.
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