Campaign is launched to make patients the focus of evidence based medicine

Doctors’ social functions have been replaced by templates and algorithms, leaving patients sidelined and overtreated, one of the architects of a new movement to put patients at the centre of evidence based medicine has said.

Clinical care has become “medicalised and bureaucratised,” said Trish Greenhalgh at the launch of the Campaign for Real EBM on 3 July at a conference organised by BioMed Central on health services research. Greenhalgh is professor of primary healthcare and dean for research impact at Queen Mary college, University of London.

Greenhalgh acknowledged the “huge importance” of evidence based guidelines. Incentivising GPs to identify and treat undiagnosed hypertension through the NHS’s Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) for primary care had served to prevent countless strokes, she said. “But add 150 …