In association with

  • West of England Academic Health Science Network



Map of Medicine

Map of Medicine supports the optimisation of care by providing access to comprehensive, evidence-based guidance, and clinical decision-support at the point of care.  Map of Medicine care pathways offer the opportunity to improve the way commissioning of health care is planned and delivered locally.

Mechanism-based reasoning

Involves an inference from mechanisms to claims that an intervention produces a patient-relevant outcome. Such reasoning will involve an inferential chain, linking the intervention (such as antiarrhythmic drugs) with a clinical outcome (such as mortality). (Howick)


MEDLINE™ is the United States National Library of Medicine’s (NLM™) premier bibliographic database providing information from the following fields: Medicine, Veterinary medicine, Nursing, Allied Health, Dentistry and Pre-clinical sciences. Covers the years 1950 to present and is updated weekly.


Medical Subject Headings: a thesaurus of medical terms used by many databases and libraries to index and classify medical information.


A method often used in systematic reviews. Meta-analyses use specific statistical techniques to combine data from different studies to arrive at one summary point estimate of effect. This should be done only if the studies were of good quality and were reasonably homogeneous (i.e. most had generally similar characteristics).


The overall, guiding approach taken by a research project or research design e.g. a randomised controlled trial, a cohort study, a case-control study, a cross-sectional study, a case series, a grounded theory study, a phenomenological study.


The approaches taken to identify a study sample, recruit participants, collect data or analyse data

Monitoring Test

Any medical test performed to confirm, or determine the presence of disease in an individual suspected of having the disease, usually following the report of symptoms, or based on the results of other medical tests. Some examples of diagnostic tests include performing a chest x-ray to diagnose pneumonia, and taking skin biopsy to detect cancerous cells. (Harvard Guide to Diagnostic test).