Tackling methodological challenges in public health reviews

TheCochrane Methods team has defined a programme of work to improve the quality and impact of Cochrane reviews in public health with the support of theMethods Executive,Methods Groups andPublic Health and Health Systems Network. The programme has been designed to foster collaboration between Methods Groups and Cochrane Review Group (CRG) Networks and to support the ongoing response to COVID-19. It focuses on producing high-priority public health reviews and delivering user-friendly resources to improve the planning, conduct and reporting of methods within them.Why focus on public health? Public health reviews, especially those relating to COVID-19, are often highly scrutinised and have wide-ranging impacts on policy and global health outcomes. However, public health reviews typically address complex questions and use a range of complex methods that are considered non-standard in Cochrane, and existing guidance is not always being applied accurately or consistently. In the Cochrane context, public health reviews are defined as those that include diverse sources of evidence (e.g., not solely RCTs), complex interventions that are delivered at the population level (e.g., policies rather than drugs or treatments), exposures that cannot be delivered in randomized controlled trials (e.g. studying the effects of a chemical or viral exposure), and outcomes that measure something other than efficacy (e.g., harms, process outcomes, implementation or costs).How will the programme support...
Source: Cochrane News and Events - Category: Information Technology Authors: Source Type: news