Our alumni

I am Mirella Marlow and I took the Masters in Medical Ethics and Law at Keele University from 2006-2008, where I was awarded a distinction.

My previous career had been as a commissioner in the NHS, so by the time I came to work at NICE in 2004, I’d had plenty of practical experience of having to make difficult decisions in health care resource allocation. At NICE I have worked on a number of different programmes, and over the last couple of years have been expanding NICE’s capacity for evaluating new medical technologies.

My interests in medical ethics include measuring cost-effectiveness of interventions to improve safety in healthcare, legal cases involving rationing decisions and incorporating ethical considerations into Health Technology Assessment.

Taking the MEL at Keele has enabled me to become involved in work on standardising the way drugs and health technologies are evaluated across the whole of Europe via the EUnetHTA project. It has really expanded my role at work, enabling me to meet and work with academic medical ethicists from other countries, and help raise the profile of NICE in this area.