Trust to hold evidence-based medicine symposium

The RCVS Charitable Trust is holding an Open Symposium in London on 30 October 2012 to discuss the potential for developing a range of evidence-based medicine resources for use by the veterinary profession.

The debate is intended to explore how evidence-based medicine (EBM) can become as available in veterinary medicine as it is in human medicine; discussions will be led by interested professionals from both fields, as well as sceptics and people just wanting to know more about evidence-based veterinary medicine (EVM).

The modern EBM approach to clinical care has been revolutionising patient care in human medicine and policy for the last four decades, and has been thoroughly embraced by politicians and the wider public, even though animated debate about its usefulness is still occurring within the medical profession.

The Cochrane Collaboration, a depositary of systematic reviews which support the foundations on which EBM has so far relied, has been growing in size, significance and number of published records.

A similar veterinary database has been more challenging to set up, due to the particularities of veterinary medicine and also to the wide number of species that veterinary medicine oversees.

As well as speakers, the programme will include a debate session, and a key ambition of the event is to set a forward-looking strategy for the establishment of a collaboration to foster EVM in the UK.

Assessing the temperature for EVM

We are running a short survey to support this event, so please spare a few minutes to give us your opinion and enter into a prize draw.

A winning entrant picked at random will be offered re-imbursement of travel costs to attend the symposium.

More information on the prize draw rules can be downloaded from the Related documents' box on the right. 

Image: copyright unknown but attributed to Rally to Restore Sanity 2010.