Luis Eduardo Fontes is a physician, specializing in intensive care and gastroenterology, and a Professor of Medicine at Petrópolis Medical School. He is also one of the five Affiliate Directors of the Cochrane Brazilian Network, launched in 2016, and here explains about his exciting new role, and experience hosting the first Cochrane Symposium in Rio de Janeiro.

Can you tell us a little more about your newly launched Petrópolis Affiliate?
The team that will run the Affiliate Center with me consist of seven physicians who also teach at the same medical school.Our Affiliate Center is located in the city of Petrópolis, which is a very nice historical city 70 Km from Rio de Janeiro. We are being hosted and supported by the Petrópolis Medical School which has a beautiful campus full of native trees and flowers. From the windows of our Center, we can see rolling hills and lots of birds. Occasionally, we can even see small monkeys (“saguis”) playing on the branches of the nearby trees
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Before becoming an Affiliate Center, our team had been working with the Brazilian Cochrane Centre (Cochrane Brazil) as volunteer translators and as authors of Cochrane systematic reviews.

What does it mean to you becoming an Affiliate Director of the Cochrane Brazilian Network in 2016?
 It is an honour and a huge responsibility. We had planned to work with Cochrane Brazil long before the idea of the creation of Affiliate Centers. Personally, I feel very excited to be part of the Cochrane family and to participate in the efforts to disseminate the concepts of evidence based healthcare to students, health professionals, media channels, patients and the community in general.  We plan to collaborate with Cochrane Brazil in promoting Cochrane's work and Cochrane evidence in our region.

Can you tell us about your recent first 1st Cochrane Symposium on Evidence-Based Health in Rio De Janeiro?
The event took place on a Saturday morning, in the campus of Petrópolis Medical School in October 2016. The main themes were the importance of high-quality evidence in the decision-making process, and how it is essential to be able to critically appraise the literature nowadays. We reinforced Cochrane’s role in producing high-quality evidence and the work of Cochrane Brazil in training authors and disseminating evidence throughout our country since 1996. The event was about the launch of our Affiliate Center and the importance of evidence based health in the daily lives of everyone in the community: the students, the healthcare professionals and the patients. We had about 210 participants, including doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacologists, hospital managers and researchers, as well a large number of undergraduate and graduate students.

 The event was very successful with the public. Every lecture was followed by intense discussions and vivid participation from the audience. Regina Torloni and Rachel Riera, co-directors of Cochrane Brazil, gave lectures about the story of the Cochrane Collaboration and its worldwide relevance and their experience teaching graduate and post-graduate students about Cochrane evidence. The greeting videos of Mark Wilson and Álvaro Attalah (Director of Cochrane Brazil) were much applauded.

We are proud that, among many other candidates, Cochrane Brazil selected us to become an Affiliate Center. We are proud to have their confidence and to have been officially nominated to be part of the Cochrane family. I am very happy and proud to have inaugurated the first Cochrane Affiliate Center in the world!

Finally, one of the main newspapers in Brazil (O Globo) published an interview with the president of the Federal Court of Justice on which she clearly mentioned that from now on the judiciary in Brazil will be using Cochrane Library to inform decisions.

How important is this announcement in promoting evidence based health care across Brazil and its many regions?
This interview was a landmark in the process of incorporating evidence in Brazil and it had a big societal impact. It is an excellent example of the importance of making Cochrane known to other audiences, beyond the university and healthcare communities. The recognition of the importance of Cochrane evidence by the national judicial system and by the media was the result of the hard and persistent work of Cochrane Brazil, and especially Alvaro Atallah efforts, over the last 20 years.

Luis Eduardo Fontes
Coordenador Médico UTI Adulto - Hospital de Ensino Alcides Carneiro - Petrópolis-RJ
Professor, Medicina Intensiva / Urgência e Emergência - Faculdade de Medicina de Petrópolis
Coordenador do Centro Afiliado Rio de Janeiro do Centro Cochrane do Brasil