Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s severity modifier on the prescribing of cancer medicines.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) published its updated manual for health technology evaluations in January 2022, and has introduced a number of changes to make its methods and processes fairer, faster, and more consistent.

This includes the introduction of a broader severity modifier in place of the end-of-life modifier. NICE has been monitoring the impact of the changes that it introduced and analysis carried out by NICE for the first year of the updated manual’s implementation shows that NICE’s committee accepted 11 out of 13 cases where the company applied for a severity modifier, with eight of these being for cancer medicines.