Evidence-Based Health Care

Carol Lefebvre gives a talk for the Evidence based healthcare seminar series. Carol Lefebvre will address the shift in focus over the last 20 years away from purely ‘literature searching’, i.e. only searching databases such as MEDLINE/PubMed for published literature, such as journal articles and books for identifying studies for evidence synthesis. She will consider the ever-increasing role of unp...

Communication taboos surround many aspects of women’s health and wellbeing, from menstruation to menopause to sexual pleasure. This presentation will briefly discuss the historical and socio-cultural roots of such stigmas before outlining the latest research on how these taboos come to negatively impact girls’ and women’s health. Dr Weckesser will focus on her qualitative research on endometriosis...

Professor Alexander Bird, Professor of Philosophy and Medicine, King's College London, gives a talk for the Centre for Evidenced Based Medicine. The replication (replicability, reproducibility) crisis in clinical medicine and in other fields arises from the fact that many apparently well-confirmed experimental results are subsequently overturned by studies that aim to replicate the original study....

A light hearted account of being treated by the 'wrong' guideline - with a serious conclusion about making sure this doesn’t happen. Professor Trish Greenhalgh is a Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. Trish Greenhalgh is an internationally recognised academic in primary health care and trained as a GP. She joined the Nuffield Depar...

Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr David Nunan from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine presented the launch of a new website that catalogues the important biases affecting health and medical research. The website is in response to a call-to-arms raised nearly 40 years ago by the late David Sackett, where he called for 'The continued development of an annotated catalog of bias. Each citation...

Point-of-care or near-patient-tests, are as these descriptors suggest, medical diagnostic tests which can be performed by a clinician, patient, or carer of a patient, without the need for samples to be transported to laboratories. These tests usually yield results rapidly, with clear convenience benefits for patients but with the potential to variably impact on clinicians. Our research suggests th...

Dr Katherine Pollard gives a talk for the Evidence Based Healthcare seminar series. This talk focuses on mixed methods research in health care education and practice, drawing on Kathy's experience of two large mixed methods projects to demonstrate salient issues: a longitudinal evaluation of an interprofessional undergraduate curriculum and a case study of quality measurement in community nursing....

Muir Gray is now working with both NHS England and Public Health England to bring about a transformation of care with the aim of increasing value for both populations and individuals. Here he gives a talk on improving healthcare systems. Here are some questions we cannot answer after nearly 70 years of a purportedly National Health Service. The lecture will address these questions and how they can...

Professor Jonathan Cook is a Senior Medical Statistician at the Oxford Clinical Trials Research Unit. His main research interest is in the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of randomised controlled trials (particularly surgical trials). Key areas of interest include specification of the target difference in the sample size calculation, addressing interventional expertise, and methods for imp...

Professor Paul Aveyard, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences gives a talk on behavioural change in evidence based medicine. In our society, we tend to view motivation, the state of 'wanting it' as a prime mover of behaviour. However, research calls this into question both directly and by showing that, even among people with lukewarm motivation, we can enable behaviour change. Using...

Dr Andrew Booth gives a talk for the Realist Reviews and Realist Evaluations short course. Realist synthesis has positioned itself as a potentially valuable tool within health services research and evaluation. Opportunistically, it now inhabits the shadowy borderland between the messy domain of real world evaluation and the perceived rigorous scientific method of systematic review and evidence syn...

Dr John MacArtney gives a talk for the Evidence Based Healthcare seminar series. Qualitative researchers employ a range of different approaches to conducting qualitative analyses. In the process, they describe and interpret data, explaining the relationships between the patterns they find and interrogating their findings in various ways to provide thick descriptions of phenomena or explanatory the...

Professor Jeffrey Aronson, Consultant Physician and Clinical Pharmacologist, gives a talk for the Evidence Based Healthcare lecture series,

The overwhelming volume of evidence and its lack of relevance to patient care and decisions means health professionals require skills to sift evidence more efficiently: discarding what doesn't make a difference to focus on evidence that matters for health This talk will present a simple effective appraisal system based on two first steps to rapidly appraise and sift the evidence for its relevance...

Trials are important; very often they are also inefficient. Trial Forge aims to improve trial efficacy by identifying and then filling gaps in trial methods research. Coordination and collaboration are key: letting a thousand flowers bloom is all very well but it does mean that evidence to support trial decisions is patchy and accumulates very slowly. In addition to introducing Trial Forge, the ta...

In this talk, Dr Felicity Bishop will critically reflect on mixed methods research that she has conducted and discuss the philosophical and technical challenges of mixed methods.

The integration of evidence with clinical expertise and patient values which underpins the delivery of high quality evidence-based medicine. Hard though this often is to achieve in practice, one fundamental principle is that evidence integrated into decision making should be the “current best evidence.” Whilst the amount of research, funded and published, has grown enormously, there is little to s...

Jeffrey Aronson presents a light-hearted talk on spelling in systematic reviewing. Jeff is a Consultant Physician and Clinical Pharmacologist at the Oxford University Department for Primary Health Care. His research expertise includes methods of classifying, detecting, and reporting adverse drug reactions, including systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Overdiagnosis is the diagnosis of "disease" that will never cause symptoms or death during a patient's lifetime. Newer, more accurate technologies, and the desire to detect disease even earlier means Overdiagnosis is on the rise. Understanding the impact of Overdiagnosis, how to detect it and what to do about it might stem its inexplicable rise and prevent the epidemic of unnecessary testing. Prof...

Healthcare research is all too often plagued by biases that are rooted in poor methods, leading to the wrong result and conclusions and preventing uptake into practice. We need a better understanding of what constitutes rigorous research; what are the different types of research that underpin decision making that matters to patients and how we should go about fixing the problems of poor quality re...

Dr Merlin Willcox gives a talk for the Evidence Based Healthcare series. Merlin’s research focuses on global health, particularly primary health care in low-income countries. In such countries, maternal and child mortality is significantly greater than in the UK – one in five children die before their fifth birthday. Primary health care has the potential to save most of these lives, if it is imple...

Professor Carl Heneghan gives a talk for the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care programme.

Prof Aksel Tjora, Professor of Sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, gives a talk for the MSc in Evidence-Based Health Care programme. Demonstrating how the potential of qualitative analysis is developed by maintaining a strong inductive strategy of concept development.

Prof Neal Maskrey gives a talk for the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine seminar series. Decisions made in health care are not strongly based on the best available evidence. There is 40 years of research which explains why this is normal, but we don’t learn much about it from health care curricula because it comes from cognitive psychology and behavioural economics. How do individuals make decisi...

Dr Kamal Mahtani is an NHS GP, NIHR Clinical Lecturer and Deputy Director at the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine. His talk explores why so much research is wasted.