Poster presentation: Promoting evidence-based health care
Gray M. Health Policy and Public Health, NHS Executive Anglia and Oxford RHA, Old Road, Headington, Oxford 0X3 7LF, UK.
Systematic reviews provide the evidence on which evidence-based health care can be based. In the Anglia and Oxford Regional Health Authority, covering a population of 5 million people, all aspects of health care from patient choice to policy making are increasingly evidence-based. Taking as a starting point the systematic reviews produced by the Cochrane Collaboration and other research workers, the Regional Health Authority's Research and Development and Public Health strategies have developed a comprehensive series of interventions to create an evidence-based health service. These include:
CASP - critical appraisal skills programme for all decision-makers including patients;
a Certificate in Evidence-based Health Care - a three-module Certificate, requiring three weeks of full-time study for key decision makers, for example nurse tutors, GP tutors and Directors of Finance;
GRiPP - getting research into purchasing and practice - an initiative which takes specific topics such as the promotion of steroids in pre-term labour and ensures that they are implemented in practice;
the development of Centres of Evidence-Based Clinical Practice to provide a focus for clinical epidemiology training and clinical practice and decision making, which is evidence-based;
evidence-based patient choice - a programme to promote and evaluate initiatives to make patient choice more evidence-based;
evidence-based hospital management - a programme of work linking together audit, continuing professional education and the library service within hospitals and health service providers, including primary care.
