%0 Journal Article %T Analysis of clinical uncertainties by health professionals and patients: an example from mental health %A Keith Lloyd %A Matteo Cella %A Michael Tanenblatt %A Anni Coden %J BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making %D 2009 %I BioMed Central %R 10.1186/1472-6947-9-34 %X From a survey of uncertainties about the treatment of schizophrenia we describe, categorise and analyse the type of questions asked by mental health professionals and patients about treatment uncertainties for schizophrenia. We explore the value of mapping from an unstructured to a structured framework, test inter-rater reliability for this task, develop a linguistic taxonomy, and cross tabulate that taxonomy with elements of a well structured clinical question.Few of the 78 Patients and 161 clinicians spontaneously asked well structured queries about treatment uncertainties for schizophrenia. Uncertainties were most commonly about drug treatments (45.3% of clinicians and 41% of patients), psychological therapies (19.9% of clinicians and 9% of patients) or were unclassifiable.(11.8% of clinicians and 16.7% of patients). Few naturally asked questions could be classified using the well structured and focused clinical question format (i.e. PICO format). A simple linguistic taxonomy better described the types of questions people naturally ask.People do not spontaneously ask well structured clinical questions. Other taxonomies may better capture the nature of questions. However, access to EBM resources is greatly facilitated by framing enquiries in the language of EBM, such as posing queries in PICO format. People do not naturally do this. It may be preferable to identify a way of searching the literature that more closely matches the way people naturally ask questions if access to information about treatments are to be made more broadly available.When practising evidence-based medicine (EBM), the ability to translate clinical queries into structured and focused clinical questions has been described as the first step of evidence based practice[1,2]. In this way, it is argued, that answers can be found where evidence exists from systematic reviews and clinical trials. If the clinical question cannot be answered by referring to the evidence base then an uncertainty has bee %U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/9/34