Welcome to Veterinary Evidence from RCVS Knowledge Chair

Abstract

I am delighted to see the launch of our portal Veterinary Evidence. As a practising veterinary surgeon I, along with many others, recognise the emerging importance of Evidence Based Veterinary Medicine and I believe it will become more and more important as time goes on. We all wish to do the best for our patients but how do we find out what the current ‘best’ is? That’s where this portal will become so useful. Not only will we publish articles that directly help practising vets and nurses to answer that question, we will also collect Knowledge Summaries. These represent a summary of the current level of evidence available to answer a clinically based question. You will also find links to other sites who are doing similar things; we recognise that this is too big a subject for one small organisation to do on our own. That’s also why we have developed an international network of people interested in the subject of EBVM we currently have 1,040 members in 44 countries.

One of the most important aspects of Knowledge Summaries is that they can, with suitable training, be produced by practitioners and nurses; many of the necessary aspects of that training can be found on this portal - a whole toolkit for professionals to learn how to formulate a suitable question, how to search for evidence and how to write a Knowledge Summary. Please get involved – that’s the only way we will create exponential growth of the number of summaries available – along the lines of the volunteers who have developed the wealth of information available from the Cochrane collaboration.

In addition we will help practitioners to bring EBVM alive in their practices, perhaps by running Journal Clubs – an excellent way of involving the whole practice team in becoming more critical of the evidence presented to them. There is a paper in this first issue which tells you how to do this.

We intend this portal to be dynamic and rapidly moving forward but to be able to do this we need people to get involved. If you want to know more please contact Richard Evans, Editor-in-Chief richard@rcvsknowledge.org

Finally if we have whetted your appetite come to Veterinary Evidence Today:  The 2016 EBVM Network conference in Edinburgh on 1^st-3^rd November. I guarantee you will come away fired with enthusiasm for the subject.

I look forward to seeing you there

Jacqui Molyneux
Chair RCVS Knowledge