Planners, managers and policy makers in modern health services are not without ingenuity–
they will always try, try and try again. They face deep-seated or 'wicked'problems, which …

Research synthesis has an important role supporting the transfer of knowledge between
researchers and healthcare decision-makers. But if our goal is to make knowledge more …

The discussion of evidence-based policy and practice has continued apace since the last
Public Money & Management issue on this theme in January 1999 (Davies et al., 1999). It …

Policy-makers and managers have always used a wide range of sources of evidence in
making decisions about policy and the organization of services. However, they are under …

The dramatic increase in the volume of research based information means that effective
policy makers must be able to conduct and interpret literature reviews. This article sets out …

Ministers are always calling for more evidence‐based interventions. Do they apply the same
criterion to their own work of making policy? Perhaps surprisingly, policy making is not an …

Evidence-based medicine (EBM), though still relatively new, is successful in challenging
unjustified variations in clinical practice and helps to protect the public by shifting the centre …

This editorial introduces the new journal and sets out some of the editors' principles. It notes
the apparently haphazard approach towards the improvement in management practice in …

As the move toward an evidence-based approach to health care has gathered momentum
over the past two decades, a broadening of its focus has occurred. Along with generating …

Health care practitioners (especially doctors) have always given assurances that what they
do is efficacious. But in the past 50 years justification of the effectiveness of health care …