Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to review severity modifiers used by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence to assess treatments for incurable secondary breast cancer.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is responsible for the methods and processes that it uses in the development of its recommendations. The severity modifier was introduced in January 2022 as part of a number of changes intended to make NICE’s methods fairer, faster, and more consistent.

NICE carried out a review of the implementation of the severity modifier in September 2024 and found that it is operating as intended. Since the introduction of the severity modifier in December 2022, the proportion of positive cancer recommendations is higher, at 84.8%, than with the end-of-life modifier it replaced, at 75%, and the proportion of positive recommendations for advanced cancer treatments is also higher, at 81.1% compared to 69%.

Since January 2022, NICE has recommended all but one of the treatments for breast cancer that it has assessed. These treatments are now available to eligible National Health Service patients.

NICE has commissioned research to gather further evidence on societal preferences that will inform future method reviews.