Abstract
In the United Kingdom, health economic evaluation has been introduced into the assessment of healthcare technologies including pharmaceuticals, and the approach of utilizing the assessment results has been used to provide standardised treatment and prescribing. A public organization named NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) plays a central role in those evaluations and provides guidance as to whether the healthcare technology can be recommended or not in terms of clinical and cost-effectiveness. However, as a result of NICE's decisions leading to limited access to some technologies through the National Health Service (NHS) and there has been a rise in the level of complaints, and the Department of Health has begun to take sequential supplementary measures so that some of the pharmaceuticals to which NICE has limited the access could be used under the NHS. Which elements caused this situation, in which these political measures had to be introduced to resolve the problems arising from the NICE guidance, despite the methods of economic evaluation being applied faithfully in NICE's decision making? This paper outlines the role of NICE in the UK and its change over time, accompanied by discussion regarding potential problems associated with the utilization of health economic evaluation to set governmental policies in Japan.
