[The educated societies and the development of medical evaluation]

The French National Agency for Medical Evaluation (ANDEM) is regularly cooperating with scientific societies. In 1995, for the clinical guidelines and medical references program, ANDEM sent a request to 167 scientific societies. Societies were asked to select topics in which they had an involvement, to provide their guidelines, or recommendations they published, and to provide experts' names. 73 (44%) out of 167 scientific societies answered: 53 (77%) out of the 73 proposed themes, 20 (27%) sent a documentation, and 53 (73%) provided experts' names. Twenty (27%) out of the 73 wished to cooperate with ANDEM to draft clinical guidelines. Thirty (41%) out of the 73 gave a similar answer with less information. Twelve wished to cooperate but did not show any evidence for such a goal. The answering lag time, the presence of scientific society headings on the letter, the absence of arguments against the request showed that some scientific societies were better organized. It seems that many scientific societies did not have a good organization to efficiently answer to ANDEM request; they have not sufficient resources to afford all their objectives. Learned societies are not well defined, and their functioning is unknown. They wish to be recognized by professionals, institutions and all organizations. The scientific production does not seem to be much developed, even if such production is their first objective.