© 2001 the Emergency Medicine Journal
Editorial
A new way of demonstrating how close the evidence is to the question you asked
Emergency Department, Southampton General Hospital, Tremona Road, Southampton, SO16 6YD, UK
Frequently, having formulated a three part question, searched and read the literature, we find that the evidence does not answer our original question well. Describing what was found and how close it came to answering our question is usually left to the authors who may tabulate the results (such as those presented by the BETs from Manchester Royal Infirmary). An alternative is to present the results in a graphic form and this maybe thought of as complementary to the tabulated method in much the same way as forest plots have been used to present the data of meta-analyses.
The method consists of constructing four axes (fig 1
). The first three relate to the question. Specifically the patient population, the intervention (and its comparison) and the outcome(s). Each of these axes is equally important as failure along any one of them will seriously affect the usefulness of that paper. The
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