How much does it cost?

I read the review of NICE by Professor Rawlins ¹ and was surprised that it does not mention at any point how much this bureaucratic process costs.

I suspect it employs hordes of people and spends millions of pounds to produce guidance that usually seems to just tell us what we already know with a bit of stuff on quality-adjusted life years thrown in.

In oncology we also have the bizarre situation where NICE produces guidance that is then bypassed by another bureaucratic system namely the Cancer Drugs Fund.

Maybe it would be cheaper to allow clinician groups to make decisions on what constitutes good practice.