Systematic Reviews Of Health Care Interventions Research Articles

Evidence That Patients can Understand and Use?

The impact that research evidence can have on patients making decisions about their own care is often overlooked. Regardless of whether patients want to lead or fully participate in their care, it appears that patients still want to be informed. We have health information that patients could benefit from knowing, a growing body of evidence and experiences about how to translate this information to patients. The Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions, translates the evidence from their reviews into summaries for the public. Research is presently being conducted to test a format for the plain language summaries. Principles such as presenting evidence in standard qualitative statements, as relative and absolute risks, as natural frequencies, and in tables are being incorporated into the format. Groups within the Collaboration are also translating the evidence for use by patients and the public. Effective strategies are being used to target patients directly and via their physicians, such as dissemination on specific patient group websites and decision aids. Research evidence and experiences can feed into the creation of evidence that patients can understand and use.

Carpal tunnel syndrome: one flew over the surgeon?s nest. The Cochrane Neurological Network

The Cochrane Collaboration is an international non-profit and independent organization, dedicated to making up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare readily available worldwide. It produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies of interventions. The major product of the Collaboration is the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews which is published quarterly as part of The Cochrane Library. A systematic review, when well done, is a reliable summary of the body of knowledge at the time. Its result may mean that one has to temper one’s opinion of the value of a particular treatment but there is no place nowadays for ineffective or hazadous treatments. Systematic reviews should be looked upon as extremely useful sorting tools to get a better perspective of current status of knowledge, and looked to see what questions new trials should seek to answer in future. This is the case of the reviews on the treatment of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS). On October 26, 2002, in Corciano, the Cochrane Neurological Network organised its 2nd Multidisciplinarian Workshop to discuss Cochrane systematic reviews on th e treatment of CTS. A variety of experts participated in the presentation, including neurologists and orthopaedic hand surgeons of different backgrounds. The main outcome of the meeting was to capture the current state of knowledge on CTS by looking back at evidence from sistemtic reviews and their single trials. Secondary outcome of the meeting was determined that it is necessary to favor controlled clinical studies on the disease correcting for the drawbacks highlighted in previous studies. Such corrections should include specific diagnostic criteria of the CTS; a larger sample size of the single trials; suitable follow up; subgroup division by age, sex, and clinically and instrumentally determined severity of the disease; duration of the disease; and degree of stressful activity. www.cochraneneuronet.org www.cochrane.org

The Cochrane Library can answer your nursing care effectiveness questions.

Systematic reviews help nurses to manage the overwhelming volume of available information by synthesizing valid data from primary studies and summarizing the results of interventions. One reliable source of systematic reviews of healthcare interventions is the Cochrane Library. This paper briefly describes the Cochrane Collaboration and the Cochrane Library. It also encourages nurse clinicians and nurse administrators to use the Cochrane Library and encourages nurse researchers to contribute to the Cochrane Library by conducting systematic reviews in the field of nursing care effectiveness.

Full publication of trials initially reported as abstracts in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Medicine 1980-2000.

Abstract Failure to identify all relevant reports of controlled trials is a potential source of bias in systematic reviews of health-care interventions. The present study aims to identify how many reports of trials -initially published as conference abstracts in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Medicine were subsequently published in full. We identified trial reports by handsearching conference abstracts published in the Journal from 1980 to 2000. We then searched the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register and PubMed to determine how many of these had been subsequently published in full. A total of 962 reports of controlled trials was identified from the conference proceedings of 17 medical societies. Of these, 589 (61%) reports of trials were subsequently published in full, and on average within 1-2 years. Handsearching conference abstracts identified a large number of reports of controlled trials, over one-third of which were unpublished and therefore not easily accessible.