The Health Methodology Group is a research group of the Philosophy Department, University of Kent. We develop philosophically well-motivated methods for health-related research, policy making and practice.

Our main areas of research are:

Evidence-based medicine. Orthodox evidence-based medicine (EBM) tends to consider only experimental and observational studies when assessing the effectiveness of an intervention. Our approach, EBM+, scrutinises mechanistic studies alongside these other studies to yield evaluations that are informed by a broader evidence base. Our approach is based on Evidential Pluralism, a philosophical theory of causal enquiry.

Values-based practice brings together a set of approaches to working with values in health and social care on the understanding that medicine and science more generally are irreducibly  value-laden and reluctance to engage explicitly and reflectively with underlying values leads to poor engagement with relevant evidence. Thus, we consider evidence-based and values-based approaches to be complementary and mutually illuminating. Our work in relation to values has been developed in partnership with the Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University and employs such philosophical methodologies as Analytic Aristotelianism, critical theory and ordinary language philosophy.