Final parallel session: Bill Summerskill on evidence-based practice

Bill Summerskill of the Lancet woke us up by showing us Marat in his bath, his point being that in revolutions such as the evidence-based practice revolution that has been raging for ten years now, there are casualties. Bill had written an article in the issues of the Lancet published that day:
Summerskill, W
Literature searches: look before you leap
Lancet 2005; 366:13-14
(free registration required to see full text). The article generated some discussion on lis-medical and Andrew Booth has recorded on his Scharrlatan blog arguments he used in a telephone conversation with Bill which the latter mentioned in his talk.
Bill was keen that the audience should not take notes, but think about what he was saying, so this account is fragmentary (he was happy to send copies of his presentation to attenders, though). He drew attention to the similarities between the Sicily statement "health care professionals must be able to gain, assess, apply and integrate new knowledge and have the ability to adapt to changing circumstances throughout their professional life" and Tomorrow's Doctors. which says graduates must "be able to gain, assess, apply and integrate new knowledge and have the ability to adapt to changing circumstances throughout their professional life", but the revolutionary content of Sicily is that evidence-based medicine is dead, long live evidence-based practice...in other  words it is not the property of any one profession. It now needs an infrastructure to support it, and he asked us though think about the part librarians could play in that infrastructure. A central problem is that there is insufficient evidence on the impact of health libraries and librarian's interventions. I had been sceptical about the frequently-repeated received idea that the profession's research skills could be better; I thought that we were being unnecessarily modest, as so often. But Bill said that articles submitted to the Lancet by librarians are insufficiently methodologically sound.
This made for lively debate.