Evidence-Based Health Care

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. Professor Carl Heneghan is a board member of the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference and has an active interest in diagnostic reasoning and how this can, or in some cases cannot, make a real difference to patient outcomes. He is also Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford, Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, a fellow of Kellogg College and an NHS Honorary Clinical Consultant and GP.

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 research.

There are major structural problems with the current production and use of evidence that needs resuscitating. If left unaddressed, these inherent problems may become entrenched and unsolvable.

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 implemented according to best evidence.

In this talk Merlin talks about the different studies and designs he has used in his work trying to address child mortality in Africa.

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 decisions, how might they make them better, and how does all this fit into the complex skill set I hope the health care professionals looking after me will possess when I need them, hopefully about 20 years from now.

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.

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

Talk by Dr Helen Ashdown regarding three rather different diagnostic studies People: Helen Ashdown

Carl Heneghan gives a talk held on January 11th 2016 Kellogg College. Recommended reading:

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