Professor Neal Maskrey, Honorary Professor of Evidence Informed Decision Making, Keele University

Evidence informed decision making? (Know your cognitive biases)

It comes as a great surprise to many, but perhaps not those studying Knowledge into Action at Oxford that decisions made in health care are not strongly based on the best available evidence. There is 40 years of research which explains why this is normal, but we don’t learn much about it from health care curricula because it comes from cognitive psychology and behavioural economics. Neal’s presentation will summarise how individuals make decisions, how they might make them better, and how all this fits into the complex skill set he hopes the health care professionals looking after him will possess when he needs them, hopefully about 20 years from now.

Neal spent 20 years as a GP, the last third combined with developing primary care for North Yorkshire Health Authority. After 12 years as a director of the National Prescribing Centre and programme director of the Medicines and Prescribing Centre at NICE, he is now honorary professor of evidence informed decision making at Keele University, and co-leads a European evidence-based, academic detailing programme at the University of Amsterdam.