It’s not often that a pressure ulcer sets someone’s heart pounding, apart, perhaps, for the nurse who discovers that his or her patient has one. But this was the experience of Dr Jeffrey Levine,  a current practitioner in geriatric medicine and wound care, on finding a copy of Charcot’s Lectures on the Diseases of the Central Nervous System, first published in 1877 and with it ‘the beginnings of the modern “avoidable-unavoidable” controversy on pressure ulcers’.

From the comfortable distance of six months’ retirement from General Practice, I read with interest the implications of this Cochrane Review, published in March 2015, looking at personalised care planning for adults with chronic or long-term health conditions. Common sense and experience might well lead us to expect that only good can come from involving patients more closely in their own care. But can this be demonstrated to be the case?

Missed our Cochrane UK & Ireland Symposium 2015? Or, want to remind yourself of what was discussed in the plenary sessions? Watch the plenary videos, here on our YouTube channel!The full line-up:Opening plenary: Kathleen Mac Lellan & Roger O'SullivanPlenary 2: Maire Ennis-O'Connor & Athula SumathipalaPlenary 3: Phil HammondClosing Plenary: Rob McNeil

While most, if not all, members and readers of Students 4 Best Evidence (S4BE) will be keen advocates of the practise of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) it would be foolish to suggest that it is without flaws. Understanding these weaknesses is important in order to improve our practice of EBM, both at an individual and wider level.

Making Sense of Uncertainty is a fascinating paper that takes the reader on a journey through what uncertainty in research means and how it can be understood in order to make decisions, or used to misrepresent or devalue scientific arguments, whether intentionally or through misunderstanding.

Three very good questions we might, as patients, ask our doctors when offered a test or a treatment are ‘is it supported by evidence?’, ‘could it harm me?’ and ‘is it necessary?’ These questions are at the heart of the Choosing Wisely initiative, developed in the US and Canada and launched this week here in the UK. It’s all about identifying common interventions that are of questionable value, which we might be better off not having, with a spotlight on the top five in each speciality.

We hired graphic artists, Jongens van de Tekeningen to create an infomural, illustrating what happened at our UK & Ireland 2015 Symposium in Dublin last month. You can now access and download the infomural, here.

Both Evidently Cochrane and Students 4 Best Evidence were awarded top prize in their respective categories at the UK B

For more information about Cochrane UK, go to the 'about us' page, here.

Read the latest Evidently Cochrane blog post at www.evidentlycochrane.net/keeping-people-warm-during-surgery-whats-the-evidence.