Making decisions and choices about health and social care need access to high-quality evidence from research. Systematic reviews provide this by both highlighting the quality of existing studies and by themselves providing a high-quality summary. Mike Clarke and Iain Chalmers [1], Iain Chalmers (James Lind Library and Fellow of CEBM), Carl Heneghan ( Professor of EBM and Director CEBM) and Kamal Mahtani (Associate Professor and Director of the MSc in Systematic Reviews) talk about the history and development of systematic reviews, their current delivery and the shortcomings in current review production and the future directions of systematic reviews, including the launch of CEBM's Evidence Synthesis Toolkit.

This talk was held as part of the Practice of Evidence-Based Health Care course which is part of the Evidence-Based Health Care Programme.

[1] Clarke M, Chalmers I Reflections on the history of systematic reviews. BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine 2018;23:121-122.