About the event:

Professor Mike Clarke - Director of the Northern Ireland Methodology Hub at the Queen’s University of Belfast.

Abstract.
At various times in our lives, and to varying levels of intensity, we all use, provide or pay for health and social care. As we decide what to do, take, offer or buy, we need evidence about the different options that are reliable, robust and trustworthy. We need evidence that has answered the question: what is likely to happen with this intervention, rather than something else? Such evidence needs to come from fair tests that have minimised bias. Randomised trials provide this. In this talk, you will take a journey through various types of evidence in health care, hear about  the features of randomised trials that make them so important, see examples of trials that have provided definitive evidence leading to substantial improvements in health care and learn about the SWAT initiative to further improve the quality and relevance  of randomised trials.

Speaker Information:
Professor Mike Clarke is Director of the Northern Ireland Methodology Hub at Queenâ™s University Belfast and Director of the Northern Ireland  Clinical Trials Unit in the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust. 
He joined the Clinical Trial Service Unit in Oxford nearly 32 years ago to work on randomised trials and systematic reviews, as he completed his D.Phil in the history of suicide by poisoning. He has been involved in on some of the world’s largest randomised trials in areas as varied as maternity care, breast cancer and stroke, and numerous systematic reviews. He teaches and advises widely about the design, conduct and reporting of randomised trials and systematic reviews, and is a founder and Research Director of Evidence Aid, improving access to research that is relevant to disasters and humanitarian.