NI Derek, can you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in Evidence-Based Dentistry?
DR It all started when I was doing my speciality in dental public health training. My lead trainer, Alan Lawrence, at the time had just finished developing a regional oral health strategy with Muir Gray, at that time Regional Director of Public Health in Oxford, and they decided that now there was a specialist trainee (me) we should start the Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry! So, I started my training, and during the 2nd week of my training programme I was taken to meet Muir Gray and David Sackett in the John Radcliffe hospital canteen and we had a discussion about evidence-based healthcare. The first thing I had to do was get trained! So I then got into the Oxford CASP (Critical Appraisal Skills Programme) and spent a lot of time working with Amanda Burls, (who is still a leading light in CASP UK Network) providing workshops teaching critical appraisal skills. We then decided to run a workshop about Evidence-Based Dentistry, to encourage the profession as a whole to get involved - this was held at Templeton College in Oxford on December 15th 1994. It involved Bob Ireland, who was professor at Liverpool who had been working on the dental informatics project ORQUEST, Steven Rear who was then the Dean at the Faculty of General Dental Practitioners, David Sackett and myself. It was my first large public engagement experience because there were people from the Department of Health, people from the Faculty and a range of the great and good in dentistry who had been invited along. It was as part of the workshop, discussing the next steps for Evidence-Based Dentistry, that it was agreed that two of those key steps were establishing the Centre for Evidence-Based Dentistry and developing a Journal in Evidence-Based Dentistry. So those were the initial stages: we then, in 1995, invited representatives to form a steering group which included the Postgraduate Dean, Dave Sackett and Muir Gray - quite a powerful group.
