Objectives
ThinkWell is a project designed to look at important issues affecting people’s health and well-being. It uses the ThinkWell website so that people can ask questions and have discussions about health and treatments and also for people to get together and design research studies to find the answers to important health questions. Patients and members of the public can also join in research studies that ThinkWell has helped to design.
Why did we get set up?
In the last decade doctors have had to change the way they approach patient care because of the tremendous growth in new knowledge from research. The techniques doctors have developed to keep up-to-date and give their patients the best possible care is known as "evidence-based medicine". We want all health advice and information to be evidence based and this is why we (doctors, researchers, patients, other health professionals and members of the public) got together to start the ThinkWell programme. Thinkwell aims to help people find research evidence and teaches them how to decide whether it is trustworthy. Where there is no evidence we can help set up and run studies to find answers. We focus on the questions of most interest to the public and patients. This will often be things that people can do for themselves like diet and lifestyle interventions.
ThinkWell was established at the end of 2006 as the outcome of an international meeting held at the University of Birmingham of healthcare consumers (Cochrane Consumer Network representatives), health care professionals and researchers who shared a common interest in public-led health research.
Who we are
The director is Dr Amanda Burls, who is the Director of Post-Graduate Programmes in Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. Read more about Amanda here.Dr Kathleen Skinner, a public health physician, also based in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Oxford works on the project.
There are many collaborators including:
Professor Brendan Delaney, Professor Maurice Zeegers and Dr Theo Arvanitis at the University of Birmingham; Professor Margaret Rayman at the University of Surrey; Dr Peter Bradley, Director of Public Health at Suffolk PCT; Gill Gyte from the Cochrane Consumers network; Alex Wyke from PatientView; Dr Akeem Ali, Director of Public Health at Herefordshire PCT; Dr Juan Cabello and Dr Jose Emparanza from the Spanish Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASPe); Ms Anne Brice, Associate Director, NHS National Knowledge Service, Douglas Badenoch at Minervation, Professor Lelia Duley at Leeds University and Professor Jim Thornton at Nottingham University.
Please check back soon for short bios
ThinkWell is an activity stream within the Charity, Knowledge into Action, set up by Sir Muir Gray. http://www.knowledgeintoaction.org/ Registered Office; 50 Broadway, London SW1H 0BL. A Limited Company in England & Wales (6533986) and a Registered Charity (1123566).
ThinkWell is catalogued in Intute. Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists. The service is brought to you by a consortium of UK universities and partners.
Read about the Spanish ThinkWell here
