Dear Colleagues,

I am delighted to announce that we are establishing a new community support team. The team will be providing a helpdesk style support service to the community managing support areas such as IT support, learning enquiries and general contact enquiries. For most enquiries from the community this team will be the first point of contact.

The team consists of three part-time Community Support Officers (CSO) and one part-time Senior Community Support Officer.

Starting today are our three CSOs:

Denise Mitchell - Denise already works part-time for the CET as the Executives Support Officer as well as being a copyeditor. She also has valuable experience of working in a Review Group.

Diane Gal - Diane has previously been involved in Cochrane projects when working at the University of Portsmouth. She is also an author on two Cochrane Reviews with the EPOC group.

Ursula Gonthier - Ursula is the editorial assistant at the Cochrane Wounds Group and will be continuing in that role alongside this new role. She has extensive experience of supporting authors from her work in the Review Group.

We are delighted to be able to launch this team with three CSOs who already have a great depth of Cochrane knowledge and experience and we hope that this will allow us to develop this support service rapidly.

In addition to the three CSO posts we have appointed a senior CSO who will be one day per week. That role is an escalation point for the team if any enquiries are particular challenging and need an even deeper knowledge of Cochrane. We will confirm that appointment in due course.

The team will be responding to a range of email inboxes, but they will also have one unified mailbox where people can send enquiries: support@cochrane.org.

Chris Champion
Acting Head of Membership, Learning and Support Services