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If you are not already aware of it, take a look at NHS Evidence – oral health (www.library.nhs.uk/oralhealth), a key resource for oral health professionals who want to stay up to date with the evidence. It provides a freely available collection of guidelines, critical summaries of systematic reviews, and patient information from trusted organisations. The collection is updated on a daily basis and users will also find news stories, appraisals of clinical studies hitting the headlines, details of events and relevant information from oral health organisations in the UK.

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NHS Evidence – oral health homepage

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The collection is managed by a team based at Cardiff University, led by Professor Barbara Chadwick. One the team's key functions is to identify and appraise newly published systematic reviews that meet basic criteria (ie, that describe a search method, state inclusion and exclusion criteria, provide results of included studies and consider the quality of those studies). This work is brought together into a critical summary that reflects both the methodological rigour and the full text of the review under consideration. It is particularly important because busy clinicians often rely on abstracts, yet often published abstracts cannot (or do not) adequately convey the certainty of effect or, more often, the lack of it.

A significant number of included reviews identify a lack of high-quality evidence to answer key clinical questions and another aspect of the team's work is to add these uncertainties to the Database of Uncertainties of Effects of Treatment. Capturing these uncertainties allows them to be identified as part of the ongoing research agenda. NHS Evidence – oral health has recently published its latest Annual Evidence Update which summarises what has been published during the previous year. The update, which covers a range of oral health topics, identified around 150 new systematic reviews published in 2009.

The collection also invites experienced oral health professionals to provide commentaries that contextualise the evidence. Most recently, John Stanfield, dental hygienist and editor of the Team in Practice considered the new evidence of most interest to Dental Care Profesionals (DCP)(see www.library.nhs.uk/oralhealth/ViewResource.aspx?resID=374007&pgID=1). Over the next 6 months, topics will include periodontal disease, dental implants, oral cancer and special care dentistry. Several of these commentaries will appear here in Evidence-based Dentistry, as well as in the NHS Evidence–oral health website.