Fundamental problems remain with evidence-based management. We argue that, rather than being addressed, these problems are treated as digressions. One explanation for this is an ongoing incoherence: the evidence-based approach relegates narrative to a ghetto category of knowledge, but it is itself a narrative. Moreover, while this narrative is becoming more polished through repetition and selec...

During the post-World War II era there has been a huge boom in introduction of new medical therapies and in improvement of health care systems. New methods are used to increase the efficiency of medical treatment by combination of knowledge derived from the literature, clinical guidelines made on practice-based evidence, and a dialogue between healthcare professionals, clinicians and patients. ...

Modern microarray genotyping now permits simultaneous analysis of tens of thousands of polymorphisms, and this technology is being widely used to associate the role of genes with the etiology of complex disease. Genomewide hypothesis-free mapping will also increasingly generate candidate genes that require further testing in association studies. At the same time, genetic effects are increasingl...

The BokSmart National Rugby Safety Programme is a joint initiative between the South African Rugby Union and the Chris Burger/Petro Jackson Players Fund aimed at implementing evidencebased sports medicine and exercise research to prevent injury and enhance performance at all levels of rugby union in South Africa. The BokSmart programme has four main elements: Ø the BokSmart Rugby Safety Worksho...

The Pediatric Eye Disease Investigator Group (PEDIG) was established in 1997 to create a network of investigators to undertake clinical research into pediatric eye problems. The group was conceived by Roy W. Beck, M.D., Ph.D., in response to the call for large, simple trials from the National Institutes of Health.1 The research group was created to develop clinical trials exploring common probl...

We describe an educational strategy aimed at capacity-building of hospital health care professionals in research and management initiated at a pediatric hospital in 2006, and the results obtained eight years after its implementation. Research and Management in Pediatrics (GIP) is an annual 250-hour course combining meetings and off-site assignments delivered through the Hospital's on-line campu...

Evidence-based medicine relies heavily on the timely dissemination of ‘best evidence’ to a wide audience of health practitioners (Atkins and Louw, 2000). However, finding, assimilating and using this information resource effectively can be difficult. In this paper we describe an infrastructure for facilitating evidencebased health care using Agora a multi-agent system. This paper discusses a ne...

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are currently the gold standard within evidencebased medicine. Usually, they are conducted as sequential trials allowing for monitoring for early signs of effectiveness or harm. However, evidence from early stopped trials is often charged with being biased towards implausibly large effects (e.g., Bassler et al. 2010). To our mind, this skeptical attitude is u...

Evidence-based medicine aims to make clinical practice more scientific and empirically grounded in order to achieve safer, more consistent and costeffective care.1 It helps ensure that interventions are backed by evidence of sufficient quality to justify investment in implementation and scale-up. Since its introduction in the 1970s, the term ‘evidence-based intervention’ has moved from being an...

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) serves at least two major communities – those teaching and studying evidencebased medicine (EBM) itself (and producing evidence), and those consuming evidence to improve patient care. Two recent developments of interest to both audiences are worth noting. First, on 1 and 2 November, 2010, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) Evidence Centre and the Centre for Evidence...