Regarding the further work being undertaken -
“the team would need to order and check hundreds of papers and then conduct any necessary reanalysis.” and
“for those studies that the SH [StakeHolder]
claimed proportions of the study population have PEM, these aren’t reported in the original studies, this information SH claimed are in other sources e.g. supplement papers, commentary papers, sister papers, interim reports etc…. NGC will have to retrieve all these additional sources of papers, check whether the SH’s claims are accurate, then do sensitivity analysis if the provided information is appropriate.” [FOI e-mail No. 57, communication of 24th Feb at 15.18 and reply 15.34]
Note that NICE have scope to carry out a further consultation, and that consideration was given to this:
“Chris was looking to communicate with SH’s about the delay after the committee meetings in case we felt that additional time was required for a second consultation or similar”. [FOI e-mail No. 51, communication of 5th March at 13.00]. It would appear that the decision was ‘no’. Nothing further is readable on this in the material released, however there are many redactions.
The guideline committee will have a further meeting once the reanalysis has been conducted:
“working on the basis of an additional 4 weeks required for the reanalysis work given the time required to source the papers, review them and hold an additional meeting.” [FOI e-mail No. 9, communication of 9th March at 17.10]. I think this meeting is scheduled for Monday coming.
This message also reveals that two different approaches to reanalysis were under consideration:
“Trust that’s ok based on either approach to the reanalysis”. It’s unclear how these differed and which approach was decided - again, this is likely to be among the redacted material.
As of today the most recent committee minute posted on the NICE website is for the meeting March 22nd:
https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/indevelopment/gid-ng10091/documents The next meeting was April 19th. It was on March 29th that NICE announced the publication delay, so the April 19th meeting would be committee's first since the decision taken and presumably the meeting at which NICE informed committee of the delay decision taken and why. This is quite an inordinate delay to posting a simple minute.
Coming back to the additional work to obtain and analyse further evidence, in my view it is safe to conclude that this evidence concerns psychosocial interventions, simply because there has been such a plethora of research of this ilk. No other field of research (on management and treatment, not biomedical) would produce "hundreds of papers".
I've attached a timeline of the comms at NICE revealed by FOI (+ included committee meetings, not that the decision was taken by committee). It took quite a while for me to get to grips with the documents downloaded from Dom Salisbury's site so maybe this will save others a bit of time.
