NHS Evidence

On 30th April 2009 a new service called NHS Evidence will be launched. In Lord Darzi's report High Quality Care for All, the National Institute for health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) was asked to establish NHS Evidence to provide access to a comprehensive evidence base for everyone in health and social care who makes decisions about treatments or the use of resources.

NHS Evidence will inform patient care, commissioning and service development. It will also quality-assess the producers of guidance and recommendations for practice in order to drive up standards of evidence in the longer term.

A key component of NHS Evidence will be an online portal giving access to high quality evidence and other information including research data and local experience. The system will be built around a search engine. Ultimately, users will be able to customise the service based on their own information needs and share local content with other users.

At the time of the launch at the end of April the new NHS Evidence portal will have limited functionality. To ensure continued access to the evidence-base the existing National Library for Health website will be rebranded as NHS Evidence and continue in its current format for a further six months.

For further information on the rationale and development of NHS Evidence, click here.