As public health issues have gained an increasingly high political profile, the need for policy and management decisions to be informed by robust evidence of the effectiveness is now viewed as crucial. While evidence-based medicine is a well accepted feature in clinical health care, public health interventions are inherently more complex and present both significant challenges and opportunities for advancing this approach.

In England, developments include the setting up of the Centre of Public Health Excellence, at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), with the responsibility for providing evidence and guidelines on the effectiveness of interventions and programmes in priority areas of public health. Further important contributions are also being made by many other research centres and groups. This book presents many of these contributions and provides a state of the art compendium on this subject. Inequality in health is a widespread problem, and the themes discussed here can be used for international comparison and application.

Public health evidence examines: international trends in social inequalities in health; the role of evidence in public health policy development and practice; the infrastructure of the UK evidence-based approach; selected examples of how evidence is being applied to reduce health inequalities in England; the methodological challenges involved in evaluating interventions and the synthesis of evidence; and how to take this approach forward.

The key message is that tackling health inequalities and implementing the evidence-based approach will require commitment from all those involved; researchers, academics, policy makers, the public and private sector, practitioners, the NHS, and local government. But health inequalities are a common problem facing more developed countries, and the book has international relevance. This timely contribution pushes the boundaries of thinking on research in public health.

Consultant editor: Simon Ellis, Astero Kanaris, Antony Morgan, Louise Millward, Bhash Naidoo, Loraine Taylor