Context
Prof. Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford and Director of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, has made sustained EBM commentary on the Letby trial evidence from late 2023 onwards. As the UK’s leading institutional EBM voice, his commentary carries the specific weight of the professional EBM community’s judgment on the reliability of the evidential base the Letby conviction rests on.
The four EBM failures Heneghan identifies
- Retrospective pattern-matching without pre-registration. The Crown’s expert evidence worked from suspect-identified cluster toward confirming findings. No hypothesis was pre-specified.
- Absence of control group. No control analysis of similar-acuity preterm collapses on comparable UK NICUs was adduced.
- Hypothesis-first reasoning. The Crown’s expert worked toward the suspect hypothesis rather than testing it.
- Non-peer-reviewed methodology. Dr Evans’s methodology was not published in peer-reviewed form.
Why the Oxford CEBM voice matters institutionally
EBM is not a fringe framework. It is the canonical UK methodology for evaluating clinical evidence. The Oxford CEBM under Heneghan is its flagship. When the institutional voice of UK EBM publicly states that the Crown’s methodology does not meet EBM standards, that is a specific professional judgment of the reliability of the conviction’s evidential base — not a specialist preference.
Read alongside
Prof. Carl Heneghan — biography, The EBM framework applied, Evidence: EBM framework, Panel methodology walkthrough.