Clinical guideline development
Since the NCCMH was established in 2001, we have been at the forefront of reviewing evidence and developing gold standard guidelines for mental health.
The NCCMH developed 36 mental health guidelines for NICE that have been translated and adopted/adapted by other public healthcare systems, including in Italy, Australia and Slovenia.
The mental health guidelines were developed from the best research evidence, using predetermined and systematic methods to identify and evaluate the evidence. If there wasn’t enough evidence, consensus statements from the guideline committee were used to form statements and recommendations. These guidelines continue to be referred to by professionals and people using services around the world. Notable guidelines are:
The first-ever NICE guideline (on schizophrenia)
The first guideline on service user experience
The first collaborative guideline with the Social Care Institute for Excellence on dementia.
Our guidelines have led to some important developments in the field of mental health. They have provided the evidence base that has supported:
The National Service Framework
The Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme for depression and anxiety disorders.
Our guideline on schizophrenia has been twice recognised by the World Health Organisation as being the best of any internationally available guideline on that topic.
In the past, the NCCMH has provided consultancy to Turkey, Georgia, South Korea and the Netherlands to develop their own clinical guideline programmes, based on the NICE mental health guidelines we developed.
Our approach is to utilise the latest evidence base and learning from the UK, and then work with local experts to tailor the guidance to the specific cultural and economic context our partners and clients are working in.
More recently, we contributed to a project in Lviv in Ukraine to develop a compendium of recommendations on common mental health problems (depression and anxiety disorders) and on severe mental disorders (psychosis, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder). These synopses of NICE recommendations were specifically adapted for the Ukrainian context.
