My obsession with using evidence come from two lessons. Firstly, discovering that much of the guidance produced (including in a book I was editing!) it was difficult to separate well researched facts, from experience from thoughts. All have their place, but it is essential to know which is which. Secondly, in a series of experiments run by postgraduate students we discovered that routine best practices were completely undermined by experimental tests.
There was an urgent need to collate the evidence on the effectiveness of actions. We thus created a set of novel processes to synthesise evidence at scale; in February 2021 we had completed 2589 reviews having read nearly two million paper titles in 17 languages (thanks to translatE project).
I will describe why evidence use is critical. Much of our recent work has been to get evidence used by creating a toolkit for evidence use by collaborating with a wide group of partners. This currently includes twenty tools and processes. I will outline these tools and describe how they can change and often transform study design, research, teaching, the creation of guidance, funding decisions,  decision making, practice, policy and the use of guidance.

I am delighted to speak to people interested in collaborating, funding or using evidence.