ABSTRACT
Origins The concept of evidence-based practice, so long under development, with its regularly changing brand names, seems now to have found its time. There are several reasons for the current level of interest among politicians, managers, front-line staff, and even a few academics. First, the personal social services are labour-intensive and therefore costly; and both state and voluntary funders increasingly require to be assured that their (or, lest we forget, our) money is being spent effectively. Unsubstantiated authority-based predictions, self-interested pressure group activity, and cosy evaluations of services from the professionals who provide them, are no longer seen as a tradable currency. Second, social work, more particularly social work academics in the USA, followed by a few in the UK later (see Goldberg, 1970; Rose and Marshall, 1975; Sheldon, 1986) tried to put the matter of service effectiveness beyond the reach of shifting political ideologies long ago, at least as far as studies where a comparison group of clients receives no service, a different service or lesser exposure, and their results are compared over time against outcome indicators, is concerned. The first large-scale controlled trials were begun in the USA in the 1930s, but due to World War II were reported only in the late 1940s and early 1950s (see Lehrman, 1949; Powers and Witmer, 1951). Incidentally, the first medical trials (of Streptomycin for pulmonary tuberculosis) were published at about the same time, just too late for George Orwell and others who continued to die of it (see Daniels and Hill (1952) for a compendium report).
