Welcome to the Centre for Evidence and Values in Healthcare
Sign up for our Hybrid Launch! 31st October, Parliament Hall, University of St Andrews, Fife – click here
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- 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, researchers, policymakers and philosophers. 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 4 hybrid meetings a year to discuss, learn, debate, and be inspired, here in the University of St Andrews.
Sign up to our events and news feed.
- 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 lso 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.
- Library of resources
Our BMJ series of Essays in Evidence and Values are available here.
Key texts are available here.
Videos of previous talks from meetings are available here.
Sign up for our mailing list here.
Who we are
Dr Margaret McCartney is a general practitioner and Senior Lecturer at the University of St Andrews. Her PhD was in conflicts of interest in medicine. She is the Director of the Centre.
Professor Frank Sullivan is an academic general practitioner and Chair in Primary Care Medicine, with research interests spanning data science, clinical research, and early detection of disease.
Professor Kevin Orr is Chair in Leadership and Governance and has particular interests in organisations in society, leading and managing.
Dr Joseph Millum is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, and as a bioethicist, is a consultant to the World Health Organisation. He is Chairperson of the International Society for Priorities in Health.
Mrs Katrin Metsis is a social scientist and doctoral research fellow in the Population and Behavioural Science Division in the School of Medicine. She is interested in health inequalities and collaborates with Dr McCartney on research projects.
How we are funded
We are very grateful to the Della Fish Foundation, who, in 2025, kindly funded us to begin this programme of work.
Our aim to become self sustaining. We do not accept sponsorship. Our in-person events are funded by low cost fees which aim to be non-profit, and cover the cost of venue hire, guest speaker travel, administration costs, and catering. People who cannot afford this are asked to contact us to discuss options.
We accept donations and we also have the capacity to accept commissioned, relevant work which falls within our expertise. Please contact us for further details.