Evidence-based dentistry--overcoming the challenges for the UK's dental practitioners.

This paper describes the historical origins and purpose of 'evidence-based practice' and describes the barriers to the growth of evidence-based practice within dentistry. It describes a new research agenda-setting process for dentistry, which includes identifying and prioritising the topics of most relevance to the work of primary dental care practitioners. By undertaking the work described in this paper we were striving to make research more relevant to the day to day decisions made by dentists in practice by introducing a new process, the intention being to promote and promulgate the practice of evidence-based dentistry.