For many patients, healthcare professionals, advocacy groups, politicians or the pharmaceutical industry executives, the word NICE (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) can be a mixed blessing. Since its inception more than ten years ago, NICE has been empowered with the responsibility of evaluating a drug’s cost effectiveness, and subsequently its availability — or lack of — through the National Health Service (NHS). A negative appraisal by NICE can sound the death-toll for otherwise promising new therapies.

However, its latest initiative is likely to draw far more supporters than detractors. Working in partnership with the National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC) and the Department of Health, NICE this week launched a website with tools designed to help UK doctors and healthcare commissioners evaluate the value for money offered by social marketing projects that are intended to help people make healthier lifestyle choices. In addition to providing information regarding direct costs to healthcare providers, the tools provide insight into the wider financial and societal costs associated with our lifestyle choices.

For example, designers of smoking cessation programs are able to find out how much money an individual who stops smoking might save through giving up smoking, the cost to the local fire service, savings on street cleaning through reduced cigarette littering and the extent of gains to employers from reduced employee absences.

The first tool, which focuses on smoking cessation, is now online and available to download (http://thensmc.com/resources/vfm/smoking-tool). Additional tools focusing on breastfeeding, alcohol abuse, obesity and bowel cancer are due to be published soon.

So will this significant vote of confidence in the role social marketing can play in addressing public health issues, change the way in which some currently view NICE? As the organisation’s scope continues to grow and its role diversify, will NICE ultimately win the argument that it is an enabler to access rather than a barrier? Time will tell.