New Chief Executive of NICE

Samantha Roberts. Good? Bad?

https://nice-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/nice-announces-dr-samantha-roberts-as-new-chief-executive

 

From the above link :

No we aren't. Medicine is treating fewer and fewer people.

We are living in an age of BPS repetition which wastes hundreds of thousands of pounds, probably millions of pounds, of research money that could be used for more sensible purposes.

There are the billions being wasted on IAPT in the UK.

There are all those people being told that their chronic pain can't and won't be treated because they just need exercise and anti-depressants.

Edit : And curing people appears to be forbidden in many situations.

 

NHS insider, to be seen how she adapts to independent role: https://www.ahsnnetwork.com/intervi...ef-executive-accelerated-access-collaborative

And recently in the privater sector: https://blog.congenica.com/congenica-appoints-dr-sam-roberts-as-non-executive-director

 

Even worse than that: all the progress that is actually happening, and there is, is coming out of cutting edge research using new technologies and tools. Those innovations barely affect what NICE does, what with the obsession with RCTs (when convenient anyway) and "pragmatic" rehabilitation.

The only effect is within the narrow confines of the technology itself, it rarely has generalizable uses. And it's almost always in the form of drugs, which medicine has developed a weird revulsion over, because somehow it doesn't make sense to fix a biochemical system with biology and chemistry. Somehow. Issues with the drug industry aside, this is a different matter.

And of course the latest fad is basically to give up on research and go full psychosociobio. The very thing that has caused stagnation by creating a rift between medical practice and patients' lives, reduced to cheap caricatures sketched out of vague questionnaires of very questionnable relevance. Which is what NICE will be all about for this new CEO.

And I fear this is the "innovation" mentioned here. Because we are actually in the worst period of stagnation in decades for medicine, because of the golden age of psychosomatics, the easy stuff's mostly done with and what's left is simply too complex for this simple-minded ideology and a fully paternalistic top-down "take it or leave it" approach.

It literally doesn't count if there is a lot of untapped potential for innovation when most of the profession has gone off the rails over wishy-washy stuff. And for good measure, let's drop psychiatry entirely, this mutual admiration society has plateaued a long time ago. Ugh.

 

It seems she has been involved in something called the Accelerating Access Collaborative - which as far as I can see just means spin to provide a smokescreen for service collapse.

Recent report "The report provides a summary of the AAC’s achievements in 2019/20. Highlighting how over 700,000 patients have been provided with access to proven health and care innovations supported by the AAC, resulting in estimated patient benefits of over 12,000 fewer hospital admissions and 125,000 fewer days spent in hospital. Across the AAC programmes this work has saved the NHS over £50million."

So why wouldn't they have got them anyway? And who says it saved any hospital admissions?
Not much point in pushing fancy innovations if you f*** the whole system up by putting bad judgements ahead of care and ending up with total collapse and six million people waiting for operations?

I may be cynical but it looks as if NICE is now going to be the mechanism for facilitating wheeling and dealing that the people currently in charge seem to favour.

 

Yea I vaguely recall a series of short (15 minute?) programs on Radio 4 and one looked at how you can manipulate people by showing empathy etc. and it was a cheap way of getting + ve feedback (questionnaires). So this might be the agenda - make it look like your doing something (media spin) while your actually doing nothing. I mean our politicians are healthy and (relatively) wealthy - what have we got in common? Putting up taxes, to fund health isn't popular so looking like your doing something (while actually not) is a whole lot more attractive.

Yea that would tie in with Cochrane ---.

 

Re private sector role, only scanned but this reminds me of Dido Harding of the disastrously (from the taxpayers point of view) track and trace. I wouldn't hold out much hope re getting NICE back to its original concept - producing evidence based guidelines. I'd expect more wheeling and dealing and, from the point of view of the ME/CFS, Lyme, Long covid and Fibro communities, I'd be concerned that spin (and lucrative private sector contracts) will be the outcome.

Maybe emphasises the need for the ME/CFS, Lyme, Long covid and Fibro communities to work together.

 

I'm sure she will be a safe pair of hands.

No more disasters like the ME/CFS guidelines.