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Howard Ryland, National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, discusses his experience as a NICE scholar.  

The scholarship programme has been a fantastic opportunity to learn more about how NICE works internally.

A dedicated series of seminars brought all the scholars together and allowed us to network with NICE fellows.

These workshops gave us the chance to learn about how NICE produces its guidelines, the role of health economics in its decisions, the use of resource impact assessments and how implementation science can help.

I was really impressed by how NICE strives to involve patients and others affected by its guidance in the process of development and implementation.

Several sessions were dedicated to presenting and discussing our own projects, which provided invaluable feedback and support from peers and senior figures in NICE.

We got involved in many areas of work across NICE, this led to lots of interesting experiences.

One of my favourite parts of the scholarship was being part of judging the Shared Learning Awards which was a real privilege.

We were all invited to join the NICE conference, which included presentations of the 3 projects shortlisted for the award that year.

It was fantastic to see the creativity and passion that went into these innovative approaches to implementing NICE guidelines.

I aim to continue my involvement with NICE beyond the programme. The scholarship has revealed the range of possibilities to work with NICE and I would love to be actively involved in developing guidelines in the future.

I hope that this will be a bidirectional process, both discussing NICE with my clinical colleagues and using my experiences to support their work.

I would recommend the scholarship programme to anyone keen to learn more about what NICE does. It is a fantastic opportunity to do a supported project related to the guidance, with input from a dedicated NICE adviser, as well as the scholarship team.

It also open doors to a whole range of fascinating activities related to NICE’s work and helps you to have conversations with loads of interesting people.

• Find out more about becoming a NICE scholar