Welcome to the James Lind Alliance web site

Despite the vast amount of research on the effects of treatments in health care, many uncertainties remain. The James Lind Alliance aims to identify the most important gaps in knowledge about the effects of treatments, and has been established to bring patients and clinicians together in 'Working Partnerships' to identify and prioritise the unanswered questions that they agree are most important. This information will help ensure that those who fund health research are aware of what matters to patients and clinicians.

Research on the effects of treatments often fails to address questions that matter to patients, and to the clinicians to whom they turn for help. The Database of Uncertainties about the Effects of Treatments (DUETs) has been established to identify and publish uncertainties reflected in patients' and clinicians' questions about the effects of treatments which cannot be answered by referring to up-to-date systematic reviews of existing research evidence. DUETs is being developed and extended using the infrastructure of the Specialist Libraries of the National Library for Health (www.library.nhs.uk), with support from a small team in Oxford co-funded by the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health. DUETs is being used to inform priorities for new research, in particular, those identified through working partnerships of patients and clinicians which have been developed under the aegis of the James Lind Alliance (www.lindalliance.org).

The James Lind Alliance is a non-profit making initiative, being developed under the direction of a broadly-based Strategy and Development Group. Its Secretariat is funded by the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health.

This Web site contains information for those interested in finding out more about the James Lind Alliance, and those who wish to become involved.