ABSTRACT
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has become a well-known and wellaccepted concept in the past decade. The concept that the best evidence can be used to make the best decisions for health has origins at least as far back as the mid-nineteenth century in Paris (Sackett et al. 1996). At one point defined in the following terms: ‘evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients’ (ibid.), increasingly the term ‘evidence-based medicine’ is being used to encompass evidencebased health care and evidence-based health policy. Evidence-based health care and evidence-based health policy have implications wider than the direct clinical questions EBM seeks to answer concerning individual patients; they also seek to answer questions on the explicit and judicious use of current best evidence for populations. For ease of reading, in this chapter EBM will include evidence-based health care and evidence-based health policy. EBM is based on the premise that evidence can be graded by quality to ensure not only that the best decision for any given situation can be made, but also that evidence gaps become apparent.
