NICE Work — Providing Guidance to the British National Health Service

When the British National Health Service (NHS) was established in 1947, its clinical standards were aligned with those of individual clinicians and their professional organizations. If the emerging NHS had tried to challenge the traditional freedom of clinicians, the medical profession would have walked away from it.Almost 60 years later, however, attitudes have changed. Medical practice based on evidence, rather than on anecdote and opinion, has gained credence. Yet studies during the 1990s showed that the results of clinical research were poorly incorporated into routine care and that inappropriate variations in the standards of clinical practice abounded, in the . . .