Why Believe Published Advice?DTB Meeting

There is now so much published advice around to assist in health caredecision-making that the individual general practitioner cannot possibly deal with it all, according to Professor Trevor Sheldon, director of the National Health Service Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York, UK.

We need to train doctors, health professionals and consumers to deal with all this information, he told a seminar held by the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin in London, UK, recently.

With increasing pressure during the last decade on policy makers and health care professionals to base their decisions more on the results of research, said Prof Sheldon, public, private and professional bodies have been established in several countries to carry out an intermediary role in pulling together and interpreting research evidence which is scattered across many sources. One of the dominant new types of information intermediaries is the Health Technology Assessment agency, such as the SBU in Sweden or ANDEM in France. The UK has no specific HTA agency, but the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination carries out a role of identifying and disseminating research intelligence for the NHS.