Draft NICE guideline

NICE, the organisation responsible for clinical guidelines in England & Wales, has now published the Lyme disease draft guideline. This will remain on-line for a 6 week consultation period with the registered stakeholder organisations. If you would like to share any thoughts or concerns with us, please let us know via our email address . Our considered response to NICE, taking into account LDA’s experience and comments sent to us, will be published on the NICE website along with feedback from other stakeholders. The guideline committee will then be considering all feedback and draw up the final guideline.

We have a brief description of the NICE process on our website. It is worth remembering that the guideline committee bases the guideline on published trials and studies and the collective experience of committee members. It is sometimes questioned why the experience of people from outside the committee has not been taken into account – either from other guidelines or individual cases, opinions and practices. This is because the NICE process works from scratch, ignoring any conclusions others may have reached in the past in order to completely re-assess the currently available evidence.  Single cases and anecdotal reports do not necessarily reflect what would happen in a larger group of people; without proper reported trials, it is not possible to say whether results can be generally applied.

LDA will draw together opinions and send a response to NICE at the end of October. Any thoughts are welcome.