COMMENT
diminishing at all, and I think it’s probably going to increase with the focus on commis- sioning against evidence-based standards. The philosophy is key.
“I think the tool – NHS Evidence – needs to continue to develop, to support new audiences, and we’re looking particularly at commissioners and what they’re going to need. We’re looking at public health, as Public Health England develops, and we’re looking at more technical ways of providing the information we’ve selected for NHS Evi- dence into other IT products as well.
“We’ve also got a search function that lets you draw on selected resources and evi- dence, and there’s more specialised resourc- es as well, databases and online journals and so on. But we also need to make sure we can push those resources out through syndicat- ing with other systems as well.”
Speed and quality
Filtering and categorising and fully assess- ing the vast amounts of potentially useful material out there is an impossible task, so a balance has to be struck between get- ting information out to people as speedily as possible and ensuring rigorous quality standards are enforced.
Dr Leng explained: “It’s an important bal- ance: speed is one thing, but there’s also the issue around selecting high quality in- formation and being comprehensive. That’s what I tend to think about – should it be the best information, or should it be a com- prehensive resource? – and people actually want both.
“So what we’ve tried to do within the search function is to have a relatively low threshold for including information. Only things that you’d say are really highly biased or pro- duced by those with a vested interest tend to get excluded, so the overall bulk of the resources on NHS evidence is pretty com- prehensive. But then we have a system for accrediting those that are the best, the most high quality, the most trusted, and there- fore the most reliable.”
Guidance
The criteria in the accreditation scheme ob- viously have to be rigorous, but are unlikely to change much because they are already so tough, she said: “They are based on inter- nationally agreed criteria for high-quality guidance and those are regularly reviewed. So the chances are that with time, they will become somewhat more rigorous but I don’t think it’s going to be an ‘orders of magnitude’ change. Continued overleaf >
national health executive Nov/Dec 11 | 29
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