As a commissioner, a manager of a service, a clinician, a researcher, or a service user you may need look for the latest evidence about an area of health and social care you are involved in. This might be to inform a decision about funding, or about changes and improvements, or to inform an evaluation or an individual decision about your choices as a patient. So what does evidence mean in this context? Evidence can refer to a range of different sources of information about an intervention, service or care that could help inform a decision about it. Research papers, guidelines, evaluations, population and surveillance data, policy, health needs assessments, activity data, feedback from stakeholders, patients, carers and the public are all sources of evidence.
“Research can do more than contribute to better decisions – it can change the way we think about issues or problems and stimulate new and different ideas about services. In short, it’s vital to our capacity for innovation.”
Professor K Walshe
Associate Director of the National Institute of Health Research
“Evidence based medicine is the integration of best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values”
Sackett D et al
Evidence-Based Medicine: How to Practice and Teach EBM, 2nd edition. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh, 2000, p.1