TTextras are open educational resources, such as games, podcasts and videos, that help people understand more about fair tests of treatments.
The most recently added resources are shown at the top of the list below. Or you can click topics in the tag cloud on the right to find relevant resources. Finally, you can use the Search function at the the upper right, but please be aware that this feature includes the rest of the site as well.
If you know of any such resources that you think we should add, please do let us know so we can take a look at them. Scroll down to browse our most recent acquisitions.
Evidence based medicine is the key to the success of modern healthcare. This booklet, by Sense About Science and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges contains case studies of 15 of the game changers in evidence based medicine.
Not only does it provide some excellent examples to help explain why EBM matters, but also it shows the unanimity across the health professions about the benefits of integrating evidence from systematic research into practice.
This outstanding resource from the Health Foundation shows, with voice, text and video, how shared decision-making can be made to work in a typical consultation.
Both patients and professionals will benefit from taking five minutes to watch this video. It is also supplemented by a collection of resources that provide more detail on the implementation and evaluation of programmes in shared decision-making. Continue reading »
This cartoon by Hilda Bastian illustrates the harm caused by excluding pregnant women, children and other vulnerable groups from clinical trials.
This practice, sometimes driven by over-protective regulators, can be harmful because it stops us from finding out how well these treatments work for these patients.
The entire blog post is reproduced here by kind permission. You can visit Statistically Funny to sign up for updates and view the archive.
In this 90-minute video lecture, Ben Goldacre talks about the problems with generating and disseminating evidence about the effectiveness of treatments.
The talk was recorded at Seattle Town Hall, USA on 18th Feburary 2013. The video is hosted on the C-SPAN website and includes a partial transcript. Continue reading »
Statistically funny is a blog by Hilda Bastian in which she uses her own cartoons to illustrate key issues in fair tests of treatments.
In this cartoon, entitled “Nervously approaching significance“, Hilda addresses one of the key problems in making sense of research reports. Statistical significance is important to rule out the play of chance in the results of research, but it’s not the whole story.
Use the link to see the full cartoon on Hilda’s blog. Continue reading »
“Big data” is a term used to describe the use of large-scale data processing technologies to analyse lots of different data sets in order to generate insights into performance, behvaviour and trends.
Many people think that Big Data offers tremendous potential in health care in analysing health outcomes of large populations. However, as this cartoon illustrates, these new technologies could still be stymied by old problems, such as failure to disclose the data in the first place.
Continue reading »
This short music video encourages health professionals to think about using evidence to help make decisions in partnership with patients.
The main messages of the video are:
The video is hosted on YouTube and was produced by James McCormack. Continue reading »
This video and animated slide presentation prepared by Steven Woloshin shows how the Cochrane logo was developed, and what it tells us.
The presentation explains relative risks, confidence intervals, forest plots, and standard and cumulative meta-analyses.
Read on to watch the video or download the slides.
Continue reading »
This simple animation by the ALOIS Community provides a lay-friendly introduction to the importance of having enough participants in fair tests of treatments and the need to be wary of statistics such as p values being used to distort our perception of research findings.
The animation requires Flash in order to run.
Continue reading »
In this 6-minute video, Iain Chalmers talks about some key failures of scientific research.
Specifically, these are: failing to address issues that are of interest to patients and clinicians, failing to contextualize new findings, failing to communicate clearly what their results are, and failing to publish negative or disappointing results. Continue reading »