Evidence about medicines: our engagement with stakeholders

This stakeholder engagement was part of our workstream on ‘Enhancing the use of scientific evidence to judge the potential benefits and harms of medicines’. Please visit our workstream policy project page for more information.

A programme of public and stakeholder engagement took place throughout the ‘Enhancing the use of scientific evidence to judge the potential benefits and harms of medicines’ project to ensure discussions were informed by the views of wider society. It included a programme of activities that engaged the public, patients and healthcare professionals in a deliberative dialogue to explore how individuals perceive and interpret medical scientific evidence.

The dialogue aimed to identify how evidence should be communicated, what the role of professionals are in this process, how individuals’ views of evidence are influenced by health beliefs, and what forms of evidence influence health decision-making.

The public play an important role in research, health and healthcare, and the Academy works to ensure our policy advice is shaped by the views of the wider society. 

As part of our policy work on ‘Enhancing the use of scientific evidence to judge the potential benefits and harms of medicines’, the Academy worked with Ipsos MORI to explore the public’s views on key issues, including:

• Public principles and values when making an informed decision about medical evidence.
• Priorities around approaches to accessing, interpreting, using, and the communication of medical evidence. 
• Moral and social conundrums that impact on the perception of medical evidence in these areas.

The dialogue covered a number of related themes, namely:

• Generating evidence  
• Interpreting evidence
• Communicating evidence
• Using evidence for individual decision-making 
• Trust and conflicts of interest

These discussions were held at workshops in Glasgow, London and Leeds, working with members of the public, patient representatives and community-based healthcare providers throughout May and June 2016. 

Ipsos MORI’s report can be downloaded on the right hand side of this page.

For more information, please contact Holly Rogers, holly.rogers@acmedsci.ac.uk.

For more information about the Academy's public dialogue work, please visit our ‘Engaging patients, the public and professionals’ section.

To inform our policy work on the use of evidence in society, the Academy worked with ComRes in March 2016 to survey GPs and members of the public about attitudes around the use of medical evidence.

The survey explored:

• Levels of trust in evidence about medicines.
• The drivers of and barriers to trust in evidence, industry funding and perceived methodological robustness.
• Levels of trust in doctors and clinical scientists to produce and use evidence effectively, including perceptions of conflicts of interest.
• Perceptions around over-medication on both a societal and an individual level.

ComRes interviewed 2,041 members of the British public online between 18 and 20 March 2016 in the UK, and 1,013 GPs online between 16 and 26 March 2016. General public data were weighted to be nationally representative of all British adults aged 18+, by age, gender, region and socioeconomic group. GP data were representative by former Strategic Health Authority (SHA) region.

ComRes’s report can be downloaded on the right hand side of this page. Full data tables are also available at: http://www.comresglobal.com/polls/the-academy-of-medical-sciences-medical-information-survey. ComRes is a member of the British Polling Council and abides by its rules.