Background:

The Cochrane Collqouium 2013 will be in Quebec City, Canada. We are organizing a special session during the congress on 22 September (15:30-17:00) entitled "Developing Evidence in a responsive approach". 

Cochrane aims to help health care providers, policy makers, patients, their advocates and carers make well-informed decisions about health care, by preparing, updating and promoting the accessibility of Cochrane Reviews.  The principles underpinning this work focus on how review teams and groups organise themselves to produce and promote systematic reviews. These do not include being responsive to important or urgent uncertainties that stakeholders face. Being responsive includes updating Cochrane reviews on topical issues, adopting methodologies that provide better insights into the questions stakeholders face or packaging reviews in a more accessible way.

We have attempted to address these issues by looking at different aspects of our processes separately e.g. setting priorities for reviews, involving consumers in developing reviews. A more holistic approach would adopt a coherent structure for developing evidence in response to our stakeholders’ uncertainties. This session includes five presentations; the first three provide insight on methods and processes that other organizations have developed to be responsive to the needs of the stakeholders. The two lasts presentations provide an overview how two initiatives in Cochrane attempting to fill this gap: Cochrane Rapid Review response and the Agenda and Priority setting Methods Group. 

Presentations:

Chairs: Peter Tugwell, Lorne Becker

Responsive Evidence Development: a Methodological Approach

Sandy Oliver (EPPI Centre)

Responsive Evidence Development: a local approach

Joanna Thompson-Coon, Rebecca Whear (PenCLAHRC)

Responsive Evidence Development: a global approach

Claire Allen, Mike Clarke (Evidence Aid)

Cochrane Rapid Reviews

David Moher (Cochrane Bias Methods Group/Cochrane Rapid Reviews workshop group)

Prioritisation of topics in the Cochrane Collaboration at the micro, meso and macro level

Mona Nasser, Vivian Welch, Tianjing Li, Sally Crowe (Cochrane Agenda and Priority Setting Methods Group)

Discussion Session:

Chairs: David Tovey, Mona Nasser

“How we can use our existing structures in the Cochrane Collaboration to build up a more responsive approach to evidence development?”