News

04 January, 2023

HTW and NICE pledge to continue working in partnership

Health Technology Wales (HTW) and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) are pleased to announce they have signed a renewal of their Memorandum of Understanding. This reaffirms the importance of their continued close working relationships and their intention to strengthen collaboration between the two organisations.

HTW and NICE undertake Health Technology Assessment of medical technologies that have the potential to improve patient outcomes and efficiencies within the NHS. It is important that they work in a collaborative and complementary way and the newly signed MoU will facilitate this.

The collaboration will help support HTW and NICE to  achieve their shared goal of improving patient access to the best available non-medicine health technologies.

Mark Chapman, Director, Medical Technologies Evaluation, NICE, said: “‘We are pleased to continue our working partnership with HTW and build on our successful working relationship over recent years.”

Professor Peter Groves, Chairman of Health Technology Wales added: “We look forward to continuing to work in partnership with NICE to ensure we collaborate on the sharing of expertise and resources and the delivery of guidance on health technologies.

“Since we signed our first MoU with NICE in 2020, we have seen the benefits of collaborative working and our intention is to continue to strength this partnership.”

Among the projects the organisations have worked on is the Innovative Devices Access Pathway (IDAP) pilot – a joint project between NICE, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), HTW and the Scottish Health Technologies Group (SHTG).  The aim of the project is to develop a pathway that allows technology developers to provide their products to care professionals and service users at the earliest and safest opportunity.