Ten questions to ask if you're assessing evidence

01 May 2007

This guide is one of a series designed to help health Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSCs)carry out their scrutiny work around various health, healthcare and social care topics.

During reviews of health and social care topics, OSCs will receive information and views in a variety of forms and from a wide range of sources. Some of this may be highly technical, somemay include demographic and health service user statistics and some may be the experiencesof individual patients and service users in using services. This guide is intended to help members of OSCs think through, compare and evaluate the information and views they receive in order to reach fair, balanced and informed conclusions and recommendations on behalf of the people they represent.

The word “evidence” is widely used in the context of local government scrutiny. Some people prefer not to use this term because “evidence” has specific meanings in other contexts, such as within the legal system and in phrases such as “evidence-based policy” or “evidence-informed policy” and “evidence-based medicine“. We have decided to use the term “evidence” here, as it is common currency in the scrutiny world. We use it in a broad and inclusive sense to cover all of the information (oral and written), opinions and perspectives provided to or gathered by OSCs in the course of their reviews.

Assessing evidence will never be an exact science but working through the questions below may assist OSCs to judge the relative value of pieces of evidence and to exercise their own judgement in weighing up the evidence they have gathered.