Draft national guidelines on stakeholder engagement in health technology assessment have been launched by the Health Information and Quality Authority for consultation.

The guidelines outline the appropriate methods for involving people in the assessment of health technologies. Stakeholders can include patients, clinicians, service providers, and decision makers. Applying the guidelines has the potential to improve the technology assessment process by ensuring that relevant and important issues are considered.

Máirín Ryan, Director of HTA at HIQA, said: “The stakeholder engagement guidelines have been developed to describe best practice in relation to involving people in technology assessments. The guidelines give a high level overview of what stakeholder engagement is, why it should be used, and how it can be done. By incorporating stakeholder engagement in the technology assessment process, we are working towards ensuring that people have a voice that is heard during the process while also ensuring that funding decisions consider all the people directly affected by the decision.”

The Authority is making the guidelines available for consultation with people being asked to comment on them over the next seven weeks. Following this consultation, HIQA will review all submissions received to inform the final content of the guidelines. The closing date for comments is 24 January 2014.

Further Information: 

Marty Whelan, Head of Communications and Stakeholder Engagement, Health Information and Quality Authority, Tel: 01 8147481/ 086 2447623 Email: mwhelan@hiqa.ie

Notes to the Editor: 

• These guidelines are part of a suite of guidelines for health technology assessment. The aim of the HTA guidelines is to produce HTAs that provide decision makers with information that is useful, relevant and timely and to ensure that healthcare interventions used in Ireland are clinically effective for patients, are affordable, and are good value for money
• The guidelines apply to HTA being conducted by, or on behalf of the Health Information and Quality Authority, the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, the Department of Health, and the Health Service Executive (HSE), on all healthcare treatments, including medications, procedures, medical devices, and broader public health initiatives. They are relevant to the assessment of both new and existing healthcare technologies.