Dazed by Darzi

I refer to the article in the July 2008 issue of your journal by ‘Professor the Lord Darzi’ (your version of the author's name) about evidence-based medicine (EBM) and the NHS ( JRSM 2008;101:342–344). Professor Darzi starts by reminding us that EBM (which used to be the acronym for expressed breast milk) has been around for at least 36 years. And after reading the article six times, I gather that his message is that EBM is a good thing, that everyone involved in healthcare should be aware of its findings, and that there is a need to measure not only the outcomes of treatment but the manner in which it is delivered. All this is good common sense and nowhere near what one might call cutting-edge observations.

What is so desperately disappointing is that it took me six readings to grasp the simple points that Professor Darzi was making. Reading his article made me feel as I do when trying to swat a fly – just when you think you have got it, the beast eludes you. Nowhere in Professor Darzi's article can one find any hard information about how the Darzi message might be applied to everyday clinical practice.

Professor Darzi seems, instead, to have fallen into the trap of espousing the obscurantist smoke screen of ‘management speak’. Example: ‘We can use an evidence base to better understand the structural enablers for driving forward multidimensional quality improvement agendas in a contemporary NHS’. If Lord Darzi and his advisers want to see changes for the better in the NHS, I would urge them to abandon management waffle, to resort to plain, basic English (preferably avoiding Americanisms like ‘incentivize’) and to give us concrete examples (rather than nebulous dissertations) on what they envisage for the future.

Footnotes

DECLARATIONS

Competing interests None declared