The “Evidence-Based Health Care (EBHC) and Knowledge Translation” approach requires that doctors and health workers base their decisions on matters related to patients, the health system and medical education on the best evidence available and that reference book and article recommendations be based on the best and latest evidence available. Simple though this concept looks, in actual fact there is a wide gap between practice and research results.
For this reason, the evidence-based approach was developed in the early 1990s as a positive step towards changing this situation, stressing the need to change the image of medical practice away from logic, rationalization, intuition, clinical sense and bias and make it more objective and compatible with the results of well-designed research and more effective in terms of patient-related outcomes. This concept has had far-reaching implications for the medical community.
It is worth noting that it is extremely dangerous to ignore EBHC in the light of the recent developments in health systems under which there is more emphasis on defining health results, assessing all health measures, an ever-increasing demand for public responsibility as far as health care is concerned, accountability for the expenses incurred, and providing access to information for all health care beneficiaries. What we are actually in need of is to grasp the concepts of EBM rapidly and put them into practice in order to avoid being lagging behind or deny our patients the right to receive such health care that is based on the best scientific evidence available.
Furthermore, in the light of significant developments in the area of information technology and the ability of educated patients in the Arab world to have access to every kind of material - good and bad alike - on the internet, for example, without verifying its validity and the extent of its dependence on scientific research, providing such patients with proper medical knowledge has become a public demand and a national duty so as to enable them to be more involved in medical consultations and help raise the health standard in the country and the entire Arab world as well.
The EBHC concept is still in its infancy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; however, it is taking relatively quick steps. Therefore, the initiative of the oldest university in the country at this particular point in time for establishing an academic centre or an agency concerned which the dissemination of this culture at all levels will help promote the university’s pioneering image not only at the local or national level, but also in the entire Arab world at large.
The College of Medicine King Saud University, the home of EBHC&KT research chair, has highly academically qualified and world-famous faculty with expertise in this fields from different departments (Family and Community Medicine, Surgery, Internal Medicine, Pediatrics, etc.). These faculty members are most likely to give their activities an outstandingly academic look.
