@pipeworx/nice-guidance

NICE guidance for England — technology appraisals (which decide whether the NHS funds a medicine), NICE and clinical guidelines, diagnostics and interventional procedures guidance, and quality standards.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1856+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• nice_search_guidance(query, guidance_type?, sort?, page?, limit?) — search by drug, device, procedure or condition. Returns reference number, title, programme, dates and summary.

• nice_guidance(id) — the record for one reference number (TA1040, NG101, CG81, QS12, …): programme, dates, overview, chapters, condition area, and whether it is current, withdrawn, terminated or replaced.

• nice_recommendations(id) — the numbered recommendation paragraphs in full text. Answers "did NICE recommend this treatment, and for whom".

• nice_guidance_by_topic(topic?, limit?) — everything NICE has filed under a condition area, the complete curated list rather than a relevance ranking. Call with no topic to list the condition areas.

• nice_recent_guidance(guidance_type?, limit?) — newest guidance first, optionally one programme.

Related MCP server: mhra-uk

Auth

Keyless.

NICE's own Syndication API (api.nice.org.uk) is not usable without arrangement: /services answers 401, and access requires an application form plus a signed licence agreement (https://www.nice.org.uk/reusing-our-content/nice-syndication-api). These tools read the public pages instead. NICE content is NICE copyright; the tools return metadata, summaries and recommendation text with the source URL on every result.

Data sources

• https://www.nice.org.uk/search?q=… — the searchable index, server-rendered HTML. Accepts q (may be empty), s=Date, ndt (document type), ngt (guidance type), pa (page), ps (page size).

• https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/<id> and …/chapter/<slug> — the guidance record and its chapters.

• https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/conditions-and-diseases[/…]/products — the complete list for a condition area.

Things worth knowing before you touch this

• Withdrawn, terminated and replaced guidance stays published at its original URL. TA762 still resolves, still looks like a recommendation, and is dead — the only marker is one sentence in the body naming TA1040 as its replacement. Every tool here returns status and superseded_by for that reason; recommending a replaced appraisal is a confidently wrong answer with clinical weight.

• A query string on /guidance/published or on a topic /products page is refused — HTTP 403 with a "Temporary Service Interruption" page, from any client, including one carrying a browser User-Agent and the site's own cookies. The same paths without a query string answer 200 and return the complete list, so nothing is lost; the pack only ever requests the query-free form of those two. /search is not affected and takes all its parameters normally.

• /search also returns guidance still in development (/guidance/indevelopment/gid-ta11340), which has no recommendation yet. Those rows come back with status: "in development" and expected_publication, never as published guidance.

• The date labels are separated from their values by  , so a \s* bridge between "Published:" and the <time> element silently yields null rather than failing.

• Recommendations are <article class="numbered-paragraph"> blocks with the number in its own heading. A plain <p> sweep loses the "1.1" numbering and mixes the "why these recommendations were made" rationale in with the recommendations themselves.

• Reference-number prefixes are the programme: TA technology appraisal, NG NICE guideline, CG clinical guideline, QS quality standard, DG diagnostics, IPG interventional procedures, MTG medical technologies, HST highly specialised technologies, HTE/HTG health technology evaluation.

• This is England. Scotland (SMC), Wales (AWMSG) and Northern Ireland make their own reimbursement decisions and are not in here.

• robots.txt allows everything with a 1-second crawl delay.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nice-guidance": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nice-guidance/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nice-guidance/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1856+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nice_search_guidance \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"olaparib","limit":3}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nice_search_guidance. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-nice-guidance is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/nice-guidance/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "nice-guidance": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-nice-guidance"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Nice Guidance data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides

• pipeworx.io

License

MIT