NICE Seeks People with Lived Experience
Dear Colleague,
Help NICE to find people with lived experience who have a passion for quality improvement in health and social care services
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) produces guidance on the most effective ways to prevent, diagnose and treat disease and ill health, and provide social care support. Our guidance is based on research evidence and takes into account the views of people working in or using relevant services, and other stakeholder groups.
Our partners in the voluntary and community sector, like you, are crucial to ensuring that we create guidance that is impactful and useable for people with lived experience. You can help us to do this in a few different ways:
Help us get people with lived experience on our committees
We are currently looking for people with lived experience, or their loved ones and unpaid carers, as well as their advocates to join the committee developing our indicators. Our indicators measure outcomes that reflect quality of care. They also look at processes that are linked by evidence to improved outcomes. Many of the indicators we develop focus on primary care, also known as care provided or overseen by someone's local general practitioner (GP), but some are also relevant across the wider health and social care systems too.
We are looking for one person with a range of lived experience across health, public health and social care, together with an understanding of quality improvement from the perspective of people using these services, to join our NICE indicator advisory committee. They will work together with one other standing lived experience committee member, and their involvement will be vital in ensuring that we hear and shape our guidance in line with the views, experiences and needs of those who are most directly impacted by NICE’s work.
It would be great if we could find someone who has knowledge or experience of how to drive up the quality of services through a range of different approaches from the perspective of people with lived experience - for example, through work they may have done to support or design clinical audits, improvement and action plans for services, or a programme of training or education for practitioners – but this is not essential.
The appointed lived experience member will need to be able to contribute effectively in a formal committee setting. Our lived experience members are paid a fee to attend meetings in recognition of their valuable expertise and knowledge (£300 for a full day meeting, £150 for a half day meeting), and we also cover travel and other expenses.
I would be grateful if you could promote details of this opportunity to your organisation’s members or lived experience networks. You might also be interested in applying yourself or wish to consider encouraging others to apply. See our recruitment advert for details of what working with the committee involves, the kind of experience and knowledge we are looking for, and how to apply. Recruitment is open until 23.59 on Wednesday 21 May 2025.
If you think your audiences could be interested, please also promote this role through social media or other communication channels (a newsletter, for example) you might have. I have attached a graphic from NICE if you wanted to use this in any social media posts, together with some suggested text (which you will find by scrolling to the bottom of my email - just before my email signature) - but obviously feel free to create your own content, or tailor our text however you want to.
We really value the contribution that people who use health and social care services, their carers and advocates make to our guidance. We know that you have a much bigger reach with people whose lives will be directly impacted by the work that we do as an organisation, and so we very much appreciate your help to get word out to people with lived experience about this role and the opportunity they can have to make a difference to other people like them using NHS and care services.
Work with us as a stakeholder on our guidance and join our NICE VCS network
My name is Jess and I work in NICE’s people and communities team - I am the involvement and engagement lead for NICE's indicators work. We have more information about NICE indicators for you to read, if you are interested.
If you would like any tailored support to get involved in this work, please do get in touch. We also have lots of information on the NICE website for voluntary and community sector partners who would like to get involved in the work that we do – it looks at how to get involved in developing our guidance, as well as how to use our guidance once it is published.
We are currently developing potential indicators on weight management, antimicrobial stewardship and asthma review. In the future, we will cover other areas, and would get in touch to invite you to register as a stakeholder if we think that the new indicator could be relevant to the work of your organisation. If you would like to chat with me about the indicator development process and what your role in this could potentially be, please do let me know.
You are also very welcome to contact me at any point in the future if an indicator should come up at NICE that you are interested in, or just if you need clarification or support or would like to share your valued feedback on working with NICE.
I also wanted to use this opportunity to flag that NICE has a Voluntary and Community Sector Network, where we would also love to have you on board, if your organisation is not already a member. The network brings together organisations who want to inform and shape our work. It’s a way for you to share your organisation's views, perspectives and priorities with NICE.
Share NICE’s work with your local networks
You may know of smaller, community-based organisations working in this area who could be interested in sharing this lived experience role with their own local networks. Please do share it with them if you think their local networks might be interested too.
Thank you so much again for any support that you can provide for this lived experience committee member recruitment - we really appreciate your involvement and any promotion you can do with the people you work with. Do give me a shout with any queries, or if there is anything that I can help with.
Best wishes,
Jess
Jess Bailey (she/her)
Public Involvement Adviser
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
3rd floor | 3 Piccadilly Place | Manchester M1 3BN | United Kingdom
Tel: 0161 219 3889
Web: www.nice.org.uk