Deliberative processes and evidence-informed decision-making in health care: do they work and how might we know?

Evidence-informed decisions are conjectured to be better than un-evidenced ones. Evidence is classified into three types: context-free scientific, context-sensitive scientific and colloquial. A deliberative process provides guidance informed by relevant scientific evidence, interpreted in a relevant context wherever possible with context-sensitive scientific evidence and, where not, by the best available colloquial evidence. Some characteristics of an empirical approach to the evaluation of the impact of deliberative processes on the quality of decisions in healthcare are identified. These are centred on the selection of key outcomes, key characteristics and having explicit alternatives as comparator.