Knowledge-base, evidence and evaluation in Public Health

The research community holds a basic value: It is important to produce knowledge – particularly new knowledge – based on sound scientific methods. Relevance and quality of research are two important dimensions related to this issue. This basic value has stimulated an interesting international discussion during the past decade under the heading of ‘‘evidence-based’’. It all began with clinical medicine – evidence-based medicine. Now it has spread to all fields of health including public health and health promotion and we read about evidencebased health promotion, evidence-based public health, evidence-based health policy, etc. Focus so far has been on evidence-based medicine. Some of the fathers of evidence-based medicine in the middle of the 90’es wrote a balanced editorial i British Medical Journal (1) defining what it is and what it isn’t: ‘‘Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about care of the individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research’’. In the editorial it was further stated that;