Objectives: Evidence-based medicine has revolutionised clinical practice and has rapidly extended to all health care. Some of the pioneers of the changes have written their version of events, books addressing the history of these developments have appeared, and there are numerous dissertations about to be submitted. Are any of these accounts going to become the definitive narrative of what EBM is, or should be?
The assumption of the organisers of this workshop is that there is unlikely to be one account that is definitive. Instead there will be a diversity of accounts. If these accounts address a diversity of issues, from a range of perspectives, they are more likely to produce an overall balanced representation of the field. Our task in this workshop is to assess current work, to identify omissions and to suggest new and productive areas for analysis. Brief presentations will be followed by open discussion.

Description: Jeanne Daly will describe how she conducted the research for her recent book, Evidence-based Medicine and the Search for a Science of Clinical Care. She will describe the difficulties she encountered, including issues of representation and the use of archival material that is still embargoed.
Sophie Hill is part of the Cochrane Collaboration and is interested in how an organisation so diverse, decentralised, so radical but so much part of the health establishment, can be accurately represented.
Iain Chalmers, editor of the James Lind Library will describe his approach to assembling examples illustrating the evolution of fair tests of treatments and refers to the importance of lodging data in archives such as the Centre for the History of Evaluation in Healthcare, in Cardiff.
Gordon Guyatt, Professor in the Departments of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and Medicine at McMaster University will lead discussion on current developments in evidence-based medicine, including policy-relevant research.

Target audience: Anyone

Style: Discussion workshop