Apart from the interest and enjoyment that such an international gathering affords, the organisers' ambitious scope is warranted by the challenges we face in ensuring that drug information is accessible, high-quality, and unbiased. This is a truly international issue which manifests in clinical, academic, and administrative settings around the world. QiQUM 2015 is well-placed to make an important contribution to this ongoing effort.

I am extremely sorry that I am unable to attend the International Conference “Evidence-Based Medicine: achievements and barriers”. It was an honour to have been invited and I was looking forward to hearing a wide variety of what I am sure will be very interesting talks. I have every confidence that the hard work of my friend Lilja Ziganshina will ensure that this conference is a great success. My very best wishes, Joel Lexchin

Joel Lexchin MD, Professor School of Health Policy and Management, Faculty of Health, York University, Toronto, Canada

Please pass on my greetings to the meeting and my apologies that I could not be there.

This is a very exciting event and an important step in improving the evidence base for medicine in Russia.

I feel honoured to be part of the Advisory Board for the Cochrane Russia as a Russian branch of the Nordic Cochrane Centre.

Barbara Mintzes, Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Pharmacy, Senior Lecturer, The University of Sydney, Australia

Hallo, I send my warm greetings to all of you at the Conference!

I much regret that I cannot be with you because I would have liked to meet you and take part in your discussions, and I am sorry not to see the beautiful city of Kazan.

I wish you a very lively, interesting and successful day.

What is very important to me is that in your work you give as much attention to the harms that treatments can do as to their benefits, both in your scientific work and in your practice.   

It is also important to teach patients (and family members) about their illnesses and tests and treatments, to listen carefully to what they tell you, and to encourage them to ask questions.

It is also very useful to start collecting people’s personal illness experiences systematically, and making them accessible to everyone on the Internet. We began to do this in Britain 15 years ago - you can see the results on www.healthtalk.org and www.youthhealthtalk.org.

Now research groups in a dozen other countries are building such collections (see www.dipexinternational.org), and I hope that Russia will also be able to join in.  This is qualitative research and so is quite separate from the Cochrane Collaboration, but I hope it will more and more converge with Cochrane in the future.

I look forward to hearing in due course about the outcome of the Conference!

Andrew Herxheimer, Cochrane Adverse Effects Methods Group, co-convenor, UK Cochrane Centre, UK

Видео - приветствие

Hans V. Hogerzeil, MD, PhD, FRCP Edin

Professor of Global Health and the Right to Health, University of Groningen Medical Center

The World Health Organization is very pleased  to participate in the first International Conference “Evidence-Based Medicine: achievements and barriers”. This first EBM international event in Russia comes at the time with the establishment of a branch of the Nordic Cochrane Centre: Cochrane Russia.. 
The rapid growth in Cochrane activity across two continents, Europe and Asia, obviously needs to include  Russia,. Russia can  assume a lead role in promoting the widespread interest among the region's policy makers in truly integrating evidence into healthcare decision making. Your meeting will give the opportunity to reason on the key achievements and barriers both from the national and international points of view.
The success of this initiative requires a very clear cooperative perspective on the part of the Russian actors - the Kazan Federal University and Kazan State Medical University jointly with the All-Russian Association of Clinical Pharmacologists, the All-Russian Society of Organization of Health-care, Public Health and the Association of Medical Societies for Quality and Russian Scientific Society of Pharmacologists, and Cochrane Russia – and a clear leadership vision and facilitation role of the Ministry of health. It also requires a willingness to participate in creating an evidence-based society, allowing patients and health professionals to access best information about medicines and outcomes, supporting clinical decision-making, and significantly proposing better answers to health care needs. 
The World Health Organization shares these goals with you. So collaboration is the most powerful approach to organize and share results from clinical trials, and to help find out more about the true effects of treatments on disease. The registration and publication of all trial results will reduce reporting biases and help clinicians and policy-makers produce more reliable systematic reviews. 
At the conference you will discuss the most important issues of evidence-based approaches in health care delivery, health policy, such as essential medicines, systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines. 
However you will be also exposed on how research can be influenced by misleading health information. Cochrane evidence is key to inform decision-making on – inter alia -  coverage and rational use of medicines. 
 Access to essential, quality-assured and affordable  medicines is one of the six WHO leadership priorities. In the last EML up­date we also reviewed a number of innovative medicines that show clear clinical benefits and could have enormous public health impact globally. The WHO  Model List of Essential Medicines now includes ground-breaking new treatments for hepatitis C, a variety of cancers (including breast cancer and leukaemia) and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (TB), among others. Cochrane, WHO Model List and ultimately any decisionmaking in health care directly depend on rigorous evidence evaluation as the scientific basis of medicines’ value. 
WHO assists its member states to ensure that health decisions are well informed by the best available research evidence. Your meeting goes exactly in this direction and we are proud to be part of it.. Your scientific programme, like the city of Kazan itself, will embrace the future by going through an exciting debate on change based on evidence. 
We wish you all a succesful conference and we expect that this will contribute to a bright future for EBM in Russia and a fruitful collaboration with Cochrane and WHO.

The World Health Organization