This item gives the critiques and papers produced for a conference held at the King's Fund Centre in November 1994. The aim of the conference was to use the OXCHECK and British Family Heart studies as a springboard for the future, to critique them for their unique contribution to the current knowledge base, but to move on to draw out the lessons learned and to consider the current cumulative evidence on which to base policy and practice. Implicit in the aim is also to take stock of what is not yet known and therefore to consider the research agenda and lay the foundations for the evidence based policy and practice of the future.