Taryn Young, Senior Specialist Scientist from Cochrane South Africa, shares news of a recent workshop in Cape Town.
How do you develop a diagram to show how HIV testing could reduce HIV transmission? Or how providing communities with latrines could reduce the number of children with diarrhoea? If you want to know, then you should have come to the recent advanced Learning Initiative for eXperienced Authors (LIXA) workshop, hosted in Cape Town in October 2016 - where the participants did just this, and more.
LIXA takes what’s in the editorial in-tray—the headaches, the dilemmas, the statistical or editorial problems—and reflects on them with participants. The three-day workshop was to help participants build Cochrane editorial skills. The face-to-face workshop sessions built on the previous 18 months of webinars between senior African Cochrane authors and editors.
In Cochrane, there is lots of discussion about GRADE. The workshop illustrated how this could influence systematic review structure and was a theme throughout the three days. Participants dissected ‘Summary of findings’ tables, and reassembled them during group work sessions.
The course was delivered by David Sinclair, who has 10 years of experience with the Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group (CIDG), and Paul Garner, as part of the Effective Health Care Research Programme Consortium (EHCRC) (www.evidence4health.org). There were more than 20 participants from Cameroon, Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and The Gambia.
Feedback was good - participants particularly liked that the workshop was interactive and that they could apply the skills they had developed to their reviews and editing the next day. One participant remarked that all senior Cochrane authors and editors would benefit from this type of capacity development.