Next event
5th February 2026
Screening – it’s complicated.
The science, evidence and practice of screening for disease
Details and booking coming soon
What we do
We help people make better decisions in healthcare. We offer a selection of day events, here at the University of St Andrews, and hybrid early evening talks, with inspirational doctors, vets, nurses, clinicians, researchers, policymakers, philosophers – anyone working in and around healthcare. We offer participants the ability to be part of a network and a community of practice, where we can think about ways to respond to the challenges everyone working in healthcare faces.
We will hold meetings and events throughout the year to discuss, learn, debate, and be inspired, here in the University of St Andrews. Part of these hybrid.
What we are interested in
We are interested in the ways that evidence is sought, created, used, described and applied, and the values that underpin these. By exploring how we think about evidence and professional values together, we hope to offer ways to think about medicine in society – and make better decisions on what we do, and why. We will not tell people what to think – but we hope, that we can help with how to think about these issues.
We are interested in both the day- to- day work of health professionals and the big picture of how medicine operates in society. This includes issues such as conflicts of interest, commercial advertising and sales of medical interventions, and how professionals communicate risks, benefits, and trade-offs to patients. We care about what drives actions and inactions—why we diagnose conditions, order tests, or choose to initiate or avoid treatments. In particular, we are concerned about bias, especially commercial bias. Biases may stem from connections between health professionals and the pharmaceutical industry, or healthcare companies, but are also linked to the commercial determinants of health, like alcohol, tobacco, food, and transport.
What we research
Our current research focus is on conflicts of interest. We start from the premise that transparency in healthcare is important, but on its own it will not fix the problems that conflicts create. We aim to develop and test ways to fairly inform people about healthcare interventions that actually can protect patients – and healthcare systems – from the harms that conflicts cause. We also want to find effective, efficient ways that enable people to make and understand their own potential conflicts. We are creating an educational resource, based on this work, that we will test and make freely available.
We are also researching the impact of our programme of meetings in the Centre, and we will publish the results.
In addition, we supply policy briefings and documents on key areas relating to evidence and values in health care. We also have capacity for some commissioned work.
Whether you are a healthcare professional, policymaker, patient, or journalist, we hope you can join us: please sign up to receive information and news about our publications and events.