Dr Keith Syrett, Reader in Public Law and Policy, has been invited to speak at an international workshop on The role of health technology assessment agencies in national rationing policies: towards elements for best practice, organised by the Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Zurich on 25-26 October 2010. The event marks the designation of the Institute as a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Bioethics.

The goal of the workshop is to debate the conceptual, methodological, legal and ethical challenges for national agencies involved in health resource allocation decisions and to start to identify essential elements for best practice. Participants include representatives from the relevant national institutions from France, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Austria and the Netherlands; key stakeholders such as patients’ organisations, practitioners, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries as well as scholars from the fields of ethics, law, health, economics and medicine.

Dr Syrett has written and published extensively on the work of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) which performs health technology assessment functions in the National Health Service in England and Wales. He has also contributed evidence to parliamentary select committee inquiries into the work of the Institute. He is the author of Law, Legitimacy and the Rationing of Healthcare: a Contextual and Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2007).