These questions are about the way we work.
General Questions
Will my health insurance cover your fees?
It's certainly possible - though would depend on the exact policy that you hold. Insurance companies like to minimise their payouts. Our services may result in a treatment which would otherwise be funded by your insurers being funded by the NHS - reducing the insurance company's costs.
If your insurers contact us, we would be happy to discuss this with them.
My health insurance provider will pay part of your fees - will you waive the rest?
Unfortunately not. We would have to look to you to cover the part of the fees not covered by your insurers.
I have a health services problem you don't mention on this website - what should I do?
Contact us - we still might be able to help. If we can't help - we may know someone who can.
How long will you take to produce the report I need?
We often require copies of your medical records and other background information held by your Primary Care Trust, depending on the exact question you are asking. Record holders may sometimes take several weeks to supply the needed information.
Once this information has been supplied, we would usually expect to complete the report within 28 days.
If you need it quicker this may be possible, but we are limited by the ability of libraries to supply the documents we need.
Some reports may require more time to produce, either because the topic is particularly large, or because our libraries have difficulty supplying the research papers we need. If this were the case we would discuss this with you as soon as it became apparent.
I don't want to pay lots of money, only to discover that there is no useful evidence to be found. What do you do to avoid this?
For most work which is likely to require in depth literature review we conduct the project in two stages. The first stage is a scoping study, where we design a search strategy and quickly assess the amount of evidence likely to be available. We do this at a fixed price. We will discuss the results with you - if it looks like there is no point in producing a larger report then we will tell you.
If you want us to go ahead we will credit the initial fee against the costs of the larger project - essentially if you commisison us to go ahead with the larger project you get the initial scoping exercise for free.
How much does this cost?
The current flat rate for the rapid scoping search is £100.
The costs for a full evidence summary varies depending on the amount of evidence found in the searches. A typical price would be around £350.
Who owns the documents you produce?
When you commission us to produce work for you we will provide two hard copy reports. The copyright for the work remains with the author.
What if I need more than two copies?
For an appropriate fee we can either provide more hard copy reports, or a copyright licence to make your own copies. If you have a licence from us we will also provide a PDF file of the report that you can print yourself.