Back to top   Who

The CEBMH was established by Professor John Geddes, in Oxford, as a part of a national network of Centres for Evidence-Based Health Care.

Back to top   What

The remit of the Centre has been two-fold:

• To promote the teaching and practice of evidence-based health care (EBHC) throughout the UK (with special emphasis on evidence-based mental health) and internationally.
• To develop, evaluate, and disseminate improved methods of using research in practice, and incorporate these in the teaching methods of the CEBMH.

Back to top   Why

Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), using the best evidence in the literature for the best care for an individual patient, 'sounds' very simple. Yet most medical students and healthcare professionals do not have the training or mathematical background to critically evaluate published research. The CEBMH was set up to address this issue through an education and research programme designed to help people acquire the skills needed to integrate critical analysis of evidence into everyday practice.

Back to top   How

The CEBMH facilitates dissemination of good practice through a coordinated work programme, comprising three main elements:

• Education and development - the CEBMH delivers a range of structured learning programmes which aim to support the needs of healthcare professionals and of students engaged in MRC Psych II examinations.
• Publications - our Centre Director, Professor John Geddes, is an Executive Editor of Evidence Based Mental Health - a quarterly digest which aims to alert clinicians working within the field of mental health to important and clinically relevant advances in treatment, diagnosis, aetiology, prognosis/outcome research, quality improvement, continuing education, economic evaluation, and qualitative research. We also produce a regular newsletter of events from our Centre Workshops, in addition to a current awareness bulletin which offers cutting edge news and information about mental health.
• Research and other national initiatives - we continue to expand and intensify the Centre bipolar depression research effort through the development of protocols and collaborative clinical trials - studies which involve both healthy subjects and patients and which act as a fulcrum for discussion of the progress of research in this field and for the dissemination of information.

Back to top   Where

The CEBMH is headed by Professor John Geddes, and is based in the University Department of Psychiatry, at the Warneford Hospital. The Department has units for research and teaching at two other Oxford hospitals: the section of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Park Hospital for Children and the Unit for Research into Psychological Medicine at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

The University Department offers specialist services based at the Warneford Hospital. There are, in addition, specialist services for rehabilitation, psychotherapy, psychogeriatrics, substance abuse, general hospital psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry. These services include in their staff honorary members of the University department, and postgraduate clinical training can be arranged in all these units.

The principal research groups in the Department are concerned with mood disorders, cognitive therapy, eating disorders, evidence based medicine, old age psychiatrys, schizophrenia, psychological medicine, child and adolescent psychiatry and suicide and deliberate self-harm.