| New UKCC Director | |||
 | Oxford surgeon Martin Burton becomes Director of the UK Cochrane Centre in September. He comments “Engaging patients, clinicians, researchers and research funders in all aspects of clinical trials and evidence synthesis is critical for the future of high quality, high value healthcare”. Click here for more details. | ||
| International Clinical Trials Day | |||
 | May 20th was International Clinical Trials Day, click here for more details | ||
| PROSPERO launched | |||
PROSPERO | The Centre for Reviews and Dissemination, which is part of the National Institute for Health Research and based at the University of York has launched PROSPERO, an international database of prospectively registered systematic reviews in health and social care. This is the first dedicated register for planned and ongoing systematic reviews from anywhere in the world, covering any aspect of health care. Researchers are able to record key features from their protocol and these are then maintained as a permanent record in PROSPERO. PROSPERO will become a comprehensive listing of systematic reviews registered at inception, providing information on forthcoming reviews and showing how reported reviews match with what was planned in the protocol. The PROSPERO team, Cochrane Editorial Unit and Cochrane Information Management System team are working together to identify a way to upload information directly from Cochrane protocols, so individual Cochrane reviews should not be registered by their authors or Review Groups. | ||
| TENALEA | |||
 | The UK Cochrane Centre has published a systematic review of research investigating whether there is a 'trial effect' related to being treated by healthcare practitioners or institutions that take part in research. This was done with support from the Health Technology Programme of the National Institute for Health Research and the TENALEA project. Finding eligible studies was not straightforward and more than 15,000 records had to be checked. A total of 13 articles were eligible for the review: five practitioner studies and eight institution studies. Meta-analyses were not possible because of heterogeneity in the conduct and outcomes of the studies. However, the currently available evidence suggests that there might be a 'trial effect' of better outcomes, greater adherence to guidelines and more use of evidence by practitioners and institutions that take part in trials. The consequences for patient health are uncertain and the most robust conclusion may be that there is no apparent evidence that patients treated by practitioners or in institutions that take part in trials do worse than those treated elsewhere. You can read and download the full review here. | ||
| NIHR Carbon Reduction Guidelines | |||
 National Institute for Health Research | New guidelines on carbon reduction from the National Institute for Health Research contain important recognition of the value of systematic reviews. Professor Mike Clarke, Director of the UK Cochrane Centre said "The guidelines stress the key role of systematic reviews in the planning and reporting of new research. They highlight why such reviews provide the ethical, scientific and environmental justification for new studies". The NIHR guidelines are designed to help the NHS meet the first target in the 2009 Carbon Reduction Strategy for the NHS in England, to reduce its 2007 carbon footprint by 10% by 2015. The guidelines recommend that researchers carry out systematic reviews of existing evidence before submission of new grant proposals and set the results of new research in the context of updated systematic reviews of the relevant research. You can download the guildelines here. | ||
| Cochrane-NHS Engagement Project | |||
| The UK Cochrane Centre has embarked on a NIHR-funded project to identify the key difficulties faced by NHS commissioners when using evidence from systematic reviews to develop guidelines for decommissioning. Richard Adams and Lakshmi Murthy have joined the UKCC to work on this Cochrane-NHS Engagement project which is in two parts: 1. Qualitative research to examine the problems experienced by providers and practitioners when trying to implement guidelines for decommissioning. 2. A systematic review of the effects of organisational structures, strategies or information products promoting the uptake of evidence from systematic reviews. | ||
| Issue 9 of The Cochrane Library | ||
| With issue 9 2010 of The Cochrane Library, this year’s output from the Cochrane Review Groups based in the UK passed through 200 new systematic reviews. That’s more than one for every working day of the year so far. In the same time, these Groups brought a further 270 Cochrane reviews up to date; the conclusions of 40 of which were changed by the updating. | ||
| Sir Graham 'Mont' Liggins | |||
 Sir Graham 'Mont' Liggins | On August 25, New Zealand obstetrician, Sir Graham 'Mont' Liggins, died aged 84. "A great scientist and a very kind man", is how Sir Iain Chalmers, Editor of the James Lind Library, described Mont when he heard of his death. “With his paediatrician colleague Ross Howie, he was the author of the groundbreaking controlled trial that showed in 1972 that steroids given to women expected to deliver early could reduce the mortality of their newborn infants.” That trial went on to be included in Patricia Crowley’s systematic review of corticosteroids and, when you next look at Cochrane logo, pause over the top horizontal line. That’s the Liggins and Howie trial. Read an obituary of Sir Graham 'Mont' Liggins |
Page last updated:
Fri 17th Jun 2011 10:53:04 CEST