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Essential Corporate News – Week ending 11 July 2025
On 1 July 2025, the Quoted Companies Alliance (QCA) published three new board committee guides to accompany the QCA Environmental and Social Guide published in December 2024.
Global | Publication | March 2017
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) produces guidance in a number of forms including technology appraisals. Technology appraisals are recommendations on the use of medicines and treatments within NHS England. The recommendations are based on a review of clinical and economic evidence. NHS England is legally obliged to fund medicines recommended by NICE’s technology appraisals.
NICE and NHS England recently consulted publicly on changes to technology appraisals and highly specialised medicines. Following consideration of the consultation responses, recommendations for making changes to NICE processes were approved by the NICE Board on 15 March 2017. The 3 changes which will be introduced from 1 April 2017 are as follows:
The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) has responded claiming that the changes will “prevent patients from receiving NICE approved, cost-effective medicines”. The ABPI says that “thousands of patients will wait longer for treatment for conditions like heart disease, cancers and diabetes while medicines which stand to benefit the most people are caught up in the system. If the NHS became more effective in its planning it could manage the introduction of new medicines in a coherent way”. The ABPI has called on the UK government to withdraw the changes.
The BioIndustry Association (BIA) has also responded that the changes will “limit patient access to novel, breakthrough potentially life-saving medicines, especially for rare diseases”. The £100,000 QALY maximum for medicines evaluated via the HST programme “will effectively stop the flow of new medicines” for very rare diseases, where “many treatments currently funded by NHS England for very rare conditions have costs per QALY in excess of £500,000…It is widely acknowledged in the industry that QALY thresholds are not appropriate for evaluating medicines for very rare diseases”.
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On 1 July 2025, the Quoted Companies Alliance (QCA) published three new board committee guides to accompany the QCA Environmental and Social Guide published in December 2024.
Publication
In the two years since our last climate litigation update, the prevalence and variety of global climate litigation around the world has continued to increase.
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Selon un rapport conjoint du Bureau du surintendant des institutions financières (BSIF) et de l’Agence de la consommation en matière financière du Canada (ACFC), environ 70 % des institutions financières fédérales prévoient utiliser l’IA d’ici 2026 .
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