Abstract

What do policy makers want from systematic reviews? Professor Mike Kelly Primary Care Unit, University of Cambridge.

The presentation and workshop draw on Mike Kelly’s experience of leading the public health programme at NICE from 2005 to 2014. In that time a very large number of reviews were commissioned from a variety of teams in the UK and beyond. These were the basis of the public health guidelines that NICE produced in that time. The tensions between the methods of systematic review and the way evidence is applied to practical problems will be explored. In particular the focus on internal validity and the way that Evidence–Based Medicine has developed tools and protocols to handle the reduction of bias will be considered alongside the imperatives of finding solutions to practice, policy and political questions.