The recent 4th International Conference of Evidence-Based Health Care Teachers and Developers, in Taormina Sicily, organised by Nino Cartabellotta and his excellent GIMBE team, was a chance to learn about and compare our evidence-based medicine (EBM) practice and teaching. This Jottings provides the “1-page conference” version, but later EBM issues will include full Notebooks on some of the themes.

How do you collect or stimulate clinical questions? The “Tools for teaching evidence- based practice” theme group collected tools for all 4 EBM steps, but just the question-asking tools are summarised here. When first teaching students about well formulated questions, triggers can be supplied from materials such as (i) paper cases from clinical practice, (ii) news articles or journals, (iii) controversial issues that challenge conventional practice (some of us were cautious about this as it also risks developing antibodies to EBM), and (iv) unravelling a guideline, and asking about …