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.