Sicily Evidence-Based Healthcare Conference 2023, reports by Hilda Bastian

I have just read Hilda Bastian's three articles on this conference on her Absolutely Maybe blog posted in November 2023:

A View From the Sicily Evidence-Based Healthcare Conference

Is Critical Appraisal Training for Clinicians Doomed? (Sicily Conference Part 2)

From the Lab to Evidence Reviews to Communication (Sicily Conference Part 3)

 

From the second article this part caught my eye:
Is Critical Appraisal Training for Clinicians Doomed? (Sicily Conference Part 2)

Quote:
That opening lecture was by Gordon Guyatt – the GRADE pioneer, who also coined the phrase “evidence-based medicine” back in the early 1990s. It was just a small part of his talk, but he cited this essay he co-wrote with Kari Tikkinen that digs into it. He argued that teaching all clinicians how to essentially do a risk of bias assessment for a primary study (like a clinical trial) doesn’t work, because it’s not enough to achieve proficiency, and they don’t use it enough later on to affect their practice – or to solidify and extend the skills.

Meanwhile, Guyatt said, citing an international survey he, Tikkinen and others co-authored in 2016, even clinicians with some exposure to relevant education don’t understand outcome statistics from meta-analyses that are critical to well-informed evidence-based practice. Critical appraisal should be left to the experts, went the argument, and clinicians should be taught the skills they need to appreciate evidence basics and how to interpret and use evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and summaries of systematic reviews.

The leaving it to the experts part is what made me so uneasy, and I’ll come back to that....
end of quote

more at link where Hilda goes on to argue against Guyatt's view.

 

The first article:
A View From the Sicily Evidence-Based Healthcare Conference

The article focuses on discussions about living reviews and guidelines, particularly with reference to the pandemic. There were apparently strong disagreements on some aspects. Hilda expresses disagreement with John Ioannidis, I'm not clear what about.

A couple of quotes from the article:

 

The third article
From the Lab to Evidence Reviews to Communication (Sicily Conference Part 3)
Starts with a short section about animal experiments and problems of evidence often not being useful for humans.

The rest of the article is about Cochrane.

Quotes
Jordi Pardo Pardo, interim chair of the Cochrane Collaboration’s board, spoke to us via video link from Canada
...
There’s a website for their re-structuring process, called Future Cochrane, and that slogan was the theme of Pardo’s talk. From March 2020, early in the pandemic, Cochrane’s central focus shifted to evidence synthesis for pandemic-related questions. Pardo said they now see that process as the proof-of-concept for Future Cochrane.
...
Instead of the editorial process, including peer review, happening at the level of a plethora of topic-specific review groups, “Future Cochrane” reviews will be edited centrally.
end of quotes, more at link.

The final part of the article is about the talk Hilda was invited to give:

Quote:
One of my past Cochrane lives was being the founding Coordinating Editor of its review group on communication evidence. And I spoke about that a bit in my plenary talk on the conference’s last day. The topic they gave me was “How to improve patients’ and consumers’ involvement in healthcare.” I couldn’t really give an evidence-based answer to that question, for the same reason I left the review group.
...
more at link.