Register before the 2 July 2020 to receive the reduced early bird rate

The 2020 Cochrane Colloquium will be held at The Westin Harbour Castle in Toronto, Canada on the October 4-7, 2020. 

This year’s theme is ‘Rapid-learning Health Systems’, exploring approaches to improving people’s experiences and health outcomes while keeping costs manageable and health care stakeholders engaged. Rapid-learning health systems apply to all levels of health care (from clinical encounter to program, organization and system) and across all parts (from home care to primary and specialty care and public health). The Colloquium will also address the role of technology in achieving Rapid-learning health systems. More information on the theme can be found here.

To ensure that all levels of health care decision-makers feel welcome and included, we were recently excited to announce that this year’s Colloquium, will now become a Patients Included Accredited Event. The choice to make the 2020 Colloquium a Patients Included event also furthers some of the key goals identified in Cochrane’s Strategy to 2020. As Cochrane prepares a new organizational strategy beyond 2020, Cochrane Canada and the 2020 Colloquium will play a key role in launching the next phase of Cochrane’s future growth and sustainability plans. This includes continuing to bring together stakeholders under the common goal of creating better health outcomes for patients.

See how the Toronto Colloquium will meet the 5 charter criteria here.

• Register today by clicking here  (Please note that you will need to login in using your Cochrane account details).
• Registration fees
• Registration guidelines and policies 

Further information:

Website: colloquium2020.cochrane.org
Twitter:  @CochraneCanada and #CochraneToronto

January 16th and 17th - Twenty-eight people from across Cochrane (and the world) gathered together in London, UK to attend a 2-day intensive training on how to apply Cochrane’s new dissemination checklist in practice.  Led by Claire Glenton and Sarah Rosenbaum from Cochrane Norway, participants learned how to improve their dissemination products and what steps they can take in their work to maximize the impact of sharing Cochrane evidence.

Participants learned a number of new skills – from how to write in plain language, to how to avoid giving recommendations in dissemination products.  From how to interpret GRADE and Summary of Findings tables and their implications on creating dissemination products, to how to involve target audiences in the dissemination of Cochrane reviews.  There was ample time for feedback and group discussion on the barriers and facilitators to doing dissemination and to applying this checklist in practice. All of this feedback will inform how the Cochrane KT department delivers the next cohort of training, and what additional resources and trainings we provide to the Cochrane community.

The diverse group of people who made up the first cohort of this training all have a large part to play in disseminating the results of Cochrane systematic reviews to their communities. They came from Fields, Networks Cochrane Review Groups, Geographic Groups, and the Central Executive team. A large portion of the training included discussion on how this first cohort could support others to apply the checklist in practice, through sharing what they learned from attending this training.

The training also offered a valuable opportunity for this geographically dispersed group to come together to form and strengthen relationships between one another, to share their knowledge and work with one another.  These connections create a synergy that will fuel further dissemination efforts – peer-to-peer learning, not duplicating efforts, and offering possibilities for new ways for us to work together at Cochrane.

• For more information on this training, please contact Stephanie Lagosky at slagosky@cochrane.org
• Learn more about the dissemination checklist

A new paper published in BMC Research Methodology describes a novel approach for supporting collaboration between review authors and stakeholders.

The paper, published by a team of Cochrane review authors and editors, is intended to help review authors engage with stakeholders and use their expertise to consider applicability of review findings. The TRANSFER Approach supports this collaboration from the beginning of the review process so as to systematically and transparently consider factors that may influence the transferability of systematic review findings.

Lead author, Heather Munthe-Kaas, from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, notes that “This paper provides systematic review authors with a template for how to engage with decision makers and other stakeholders. All too often we conduct systematic reviews and fail to consider how the review findings will be used in real life. When we have the opportunity to discuss the review beforehand with practitioners and decision makers, we are sitting on a wealth of knowledge and expertise that we ourselves often lack. TRANSFER helps us to use stakeholder knowledge to consider context and how an intervention may work in a local context.”

The paper is intended primarily for researchers undertaking systematic reviews that will be used to inform decision making processes, but it is also relevant for decision makers and practitioners.

• Read ‘The TRANSFER Approach for assessing the transferability of systematic review findings’

In 2017, Cochrane Sweden initiated the Cochrane International Mobility Programme  to promote research projects and training periods across the Cochrane network. Modelled on the European student exchange program, Erasmus, the scheme currently on trial is aimed at giving people interested in contributing to Cochrane, the opportunity to learn from Cochrane members in different parts of the world. The scheme is the idea of Matteo Bruschettini, Centre Director of Cochrane Sweden. He tells us more about this in this short interview.

Tell us about yourself
I’m a neonatologist working at Lund University, where I am an Associate Professor of pediatrics. I first learned about systematic reviews in 2010-11, when I attended a master’s course at Instituto Mario Negri in Milan. Soon afterwards, I started to prepare my first Cochrane review, mainly in neonatology. Since its launch in 2017, I have worked as Cochrane Sweden’s director.

Can you tell us about the Cochrane International Mobility programme (CIM)?
It is an initiative which Cochrane Sweden launched at the end of 2017 to promote research projects and training periods at Cochrane Centres in other countries. It is a kind of Cochrane Erasmus program and is not limited to Europe only. The programme is for everyone engaged in health research. Though the original aim was for the program to be for students, anyone with an interest in Cochrane and our work is welcome to participate in the program.

How did it come about?
Well, the idea came to me as I wanted to develop research projects, enrich the training of medical students and to promote international relationships between Cochrane units, in line with the Cochrane principles. So, we figured out a kind of Cochrane-Erasmus initiative. A few months after the launch of Cochrane Sweden (May 2017), we explored the possibility of offering high-quality training to the medical students coming to our Centre for a 20-week research period during their last year at medical school. The first experience involved Petter who spent 4 weeks in February 2018 at Cochrane Austria. This Centre was involved because of our ongoing collaborations and because of language needs, (Petter is fluent in German). It worked very well; Petter has published two systematic reviews (one with Cochrane Austria and one with Cochrane Sweden), became co-author in an ongoing Cochrane review, introduced other medical students to Cochrane, and attended the 2018 Colloquium contributing to a presentation on how to engage medical students.

What has happened so far?
In September 2018, a colleague of Petter; Kevin, contacted me and enquired about participating in a similar program.  Kevin has spent three weeks at Cochrane Netherlands and in collaboration with them, we, with Kevin, are currently completing a systematic review. In early 2019, another student called Sandra had her 20-week period at Cochrane Sweden. She has spent four weeks in Denmark working with the Cochrane Anaesthesia, Critical and Emergency Care Review Group, resulting in Sandra along with others producing a review, which has just published.

In March 2019, Chiara, a physician, moved from Italy to Cochrane Sweden, where she spent 3 months training and conducted two reviews with us, including a Cochrane review (submitted in 2019). During the summer 2019, Franciszek Borys, from Cochrane Poland, has been involved in a research project on harms reporting in Cochrane reviews, in collaboration with the Director of Cochrane Sustainable Health Care, who is also based at Lund University Hospital, like Cochrane Sweden. In September 2019, Astrid contacted our Centre because she wanted to prepare a systematic review for her master thesis. After a four-week training period at Cochrane Netherlands, she has now completed a review of diagnostic studies (to be submitted). Currently there are two “CIM people” at our Centre: Mari, a physician and PhD student from Cochrane Japan; Israel, a physician from Cochrane Brazil. All these eight students and medical doctors are involved in projects in neonatology, which is my main research area. However, we are open to different topics as well.

Have these achievements been presented within the international Cochrane community?
Absolutely! Dina, Communication Consultant at Cochrane Sweden, presented a poster on CIM at the virtual Cochrane Colloquium 2019, in collaboration with 19 Cochrane groups. There are also other Cochrane Centre’s communicating about CIM and we have started profiles on Cochrane.org on our participants.

View Franciszek's CIM Profile

Our aim is to share our initiative and experience with others in Cochrane to inspire them to consider doing something similar. We would like to foster new partnerships  with others in Cochrane. So, my ‘take-home message’ from this interview would be for Cochrane groups across the world to consider joining us in offering a placement.  Do feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to know more about CIM and our experience with the programme. You can also read more about researchers who have trained with us at our Centre.

What are you hoping might happen next?
At Cochrane Sweden we are proud of the enthusiastic feedback we have received so far from the students. Moreover, CIM also supports staff from different Cochrane centres in building relationships and collaborating on research. In March 2020, Simon, a Swedish junior researcher is heading to Cochrane South Africa for a month, then back to our Centre to complete his training. We are planning to build joint projects with steering committee of Cochrane Early Career Professionals, chaired by Robin Vernooij, and hopefully to expand and enrich CIM activities.

Furthermore, we’re delighted to have started further conversations with Cochrane Croatia, Cochrane Australia, Cochrane Norway and Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) Group. 

We just find it important to share this knowledge with others in Cochrane to create awareness about this initiative and share our experiences also.

How can people interested in this program fund an exchange?
So far, no funding has been allocated to support the program. All Cochrane groups have provided training and supervision for free. Swedish students received a small travel grant from Lund University; the Italian student will benefit from an Erasmus Plus grant (to cover a small part of the costs). Cochrane Croatia may provide accommodation for free. We are delighted that CIM has successfully spread across all continents, in line with our organization, which is a global collaboration with researchers from around the world. We at Cochrane Sweden do not have the resources to undertake an exchange program for all of Cochrane and it would be great if this initiative might grow in to an established Cochrane program sometime in the near future.

Who can get involved?
So far, nothing is set in stone and we tailor each program. Opportunities to join a CIM programme are listed on Cochrane Training website, where a wide range of programmes are listed. CIM is for everyone, all ages and all backgrounds.

How can people get in touch with you?
Any staff member at Cochrane Sweden can be easily contacted here. 

• #CochraneInternationalMobility on Twitter

Mark Wilson, CEO and Karla Soares Weiser, Editor in Chief extend their warmest wishes to the Cochrane community at the beginning of this new year.

Here, they reflect on the achievements from the last 12 months, including their personal highlights and summarize what lies ahead for Cochrane over the next year.

The Governing Board has approved five organizational targets this year, as part of the Strategy to 2020, which the Central Executive Team and Cochrane community will focus on. They are:

1. Improving our technology and revising our processes to create more timely, consistent and efficient editorial and production systems. This will include selection of a new Editorial Management System, which will be implemented in 2020 and into 2021.
2. In 2020, new, more rigorous policies on Conflict of Interest will be implemented and Cochrane will strengthen and clarify its position on financial interests.
3. This year there will be a consultation with external and internal stakeholders to achieve a common understanding of the challenges and opportunities for Cochrane in delivering universal, immediate Open Access to Cochrane Reviews whilst continuing to ensure organizational financial sustainability.  The outputs of the consultation will directly inform any future revisions to existing policy.
4. Plain Language Summaries (PLSs) are a key dissemination product created and published with every Cochrane Review. This project aims, through a pilot, to determine a new approach and format that simplifies and standardizes Cochrane’s PLSs to improve the readability and understandability of Cochrane evidence.
5. In 2020, a new strategic framework and plan will be developed and launched, setting out Cochrane’s priorities and decision-making framework from 2021 onwards.

Read the Strategy to 2020

Read more about Cochrane’s 2020 Annual Targets

We are seeking volunteers for a brief informal discussion to share your experiences or to be part of an international Working Group helping to guide evaluation tools and case studies.

Cochrane’s vision is a world of improved health, with decisions informed by high-quality research evidence. But to what extent are we formally achieving our vision? In 2020, we are beginning an exciting journey to understand how well we are succeeding, what is working and where we could develop further.

During the delivery of our Strategy to 2020, we have been working hard at making our evidence more accessible to people across the world and encouraging the use of our evidence to inform and change policy and practice.

We now want to look more closely at what we’ve achieved and how we could develop further expanding our knowledge translation activities in more meaningful ways. The first step is to understand how people use Cochrane’s health evidence, what helps them and what gets in the way.

From February 2020, Cochrane’s Knowledge Translation (KT) Department together will embark on the ‘Cochrane KT Evaluation Support Project’ looking at how Cochrane evidence is used by our target audiences and how we might formally evaluate our impacts. And, most importantly, we want to develop tools and training to help evaluate the benefits of our work.

To begin, we want to talk to as many members of the Cochrane community and other stakeholders as we can about how audiences’ access and use evidence, and possible evaluation approaches. We are wanting to hear from you if you would like to:

• Volunteer for a brief informal discussion to share your experiences sharing Cochrane evidence with any of our target audiences (consumers/patients and the general public, healthcare practitioners, policymakers, and/or researchers/research funders); through a one-hour Skype call; And/or:
• Be part of an international Working Group of people across Cochrane helping to guide evaluation tools and case studies with monthly one-hour teleconferences.

If you’d like to be involved or want more information, please contact Jo Anthony, Cochrane’s Head of Knowledge Translation, janthony@cochrane.org or Karen Head, Cochrane’s Knowledge Translation Project Manager khead@cochrane.org by Friday 7th February, 2020.

• Find out more about Cochrane’s KT Support Project overview document
• Find out more about Cochrane’s KT monitoring and evaluation project
• Find out more about knowledge translation in Cochrane

Cochrane is revising our current commercial sponsorship policy and also developing a non-financial or academic conflict of interest policy. Read about the progress to date, view project reports and recommendations, and learn about the next steps.

Cochrane’s policy on conflict of interest (COI) is very important to those who create and use Cochrane Library content. We strive to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest in the conduct of Cochrane Reviews and as a result we have a policy that is stricter than that of most biomedical journals (1).

Progress to date

The current version was last updated in 2014, so there was a clear need to review and refresh the policy and many members of the Cochrane community will be aware that work to do this got underway late in 2018. As background to the policy revision the COI Project Team undertook three separate pieces of work; a review of organizational COI policies and selective review of academic research; a survey of Cochrane community members; and a series of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and conflict of interest experts.

• Read the three project reports:
  • a review of organizational COI policies and selective review of academic research;
  • a survey of Cochrane community members; and
  • a series of semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders and conflict of interest experts.

The findings from the interviews, survey and organizational policy review, together with expertise from the COI Project Board and knowledge of the cases that had been referred to the Funding Arbiters and Panel in the past, were used to generate a set of recommendations for change which were presented to Cochrane’s Governing Board in Santiago, in October 2019.

• Read the recommendations paper

What's next?

All recommendations were approved by the Board and work on a draft policy is currently underway. In addition the Editorial and Methods Department is working on a detailed implementation plan to disseminate information about the policy changes, raise awareness of their implications, and provide training opportunities before the policy is officially launched.

•  Visit the COI Policy revision project webpage

1. Bero L. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2018/11/12/lisa-bero-more-journals-should-have-conflict-of-interest-policies-as-strict-as-cochrane/. [Internet]: thebmjopinion, November 12, 2018. (cited January 2020)

The Early Career Professionals group aims to provide its members with opportunities to enhance their knowledge, skills, and expertise by providing a platform for international networking with early career professionals or other members in the Cochrane community.

After the success of the ‘30 Under 30’ series which aimed to introduce young people involved in Cochrane, a new organisational group, Early Career Professionals (ECP), established with the help of the people presented in the series.

This group has four main objectives, including international networking, representing trainees, active patient involvement, and knowledge translation. The last two items are a high priority to the Cochrane community, and the group hopes to involve younger researchers and consumers with them.

Everyone involved in Cochrane can be a part of this group. The steering group involves 12 people from the ’Cochrane's 30 Under 30’ series. They are as follows: Robin W.M. Vernooij (chair), Ahmad Sofi-Mahmudi (vice-chair), Andrés Viteri García, Etienne Ngeh, Heidi Gardner, Ibrahem Hanafi, Joel Pollet, Meisser Madera, Ndi Euphrasia Ebai-Atuh, Santiago Castiello, Sarah Tanveer, and Tahira Devji.

• Visit the Early Career Professionals Cochrane Group page on Cochrane Community
• Follow ECP on Twitter and Instagram with #CochraneEarlyCareer hashtag

For further information about ECP Cochrane Group, please contact:

Robin W.M. Vernooij

Chair of ECP Cochrane Group

E-mail: robinvernooij@gmail.com

or

Ahmad Sofi-Mahmudi

Vice-chair of ECP Cochrane Group

E-mail: ahmad.pub@gmail.com

As previously announced, Cochrane has been reviewing the editorial management systems (EMS) used by our editors and authors to prepare Cochrane Reviews, and other content published in the Cochrane Library. Cochrane engaged an experienced consultancy team, Origin Editorial, to partner in this work.

Origin Editorial has helped Cochrane to document stakeholder requirements, assess the potential for Archie to meet these requirements, and identify potential external systems that could meet these requirements. This phase of work is now complete with the key decisions:

• Cochrane will not continue to develop its own EMS, and the editorial management parts of Archie will be decommissioned. The other Archie functions will be reviewed separately.
• Cochrane will explore a small number of commercial EMS providers in more detail, with the aim of selecting one for implementation.

Cochrane's programme of work to review, evaluate, select, and implement a new EMS started this year and will extend into 2020 and beyond. This programme will also look at the linked production systems used to deliver content from the EMS to the publisher platform for the Cochrane Library. A combined review will ensure these systems are complementary and work efficiently together.

On behalf of the Project Team and Origin Editorial, I would like to thank everyone who participated in the discussions, interviews, and survey as the stakeholder requirements were gathered. My thanks also to the members of the Project Team and Project Board who led and oversaw the work this year on the project to evaluate the potential new EMS approaches. These groups are now standing down as new projects are set up for the next stages in the programme of work.

I look forward to sharing a further update in the new year.

Chris Mavergames

Head of ITS/CIO and Programme/Project Sponsor

Cochrane is a global community of over 11,000 members and 68,000 supporters from more than 130 countries. We are researchers, health professionals, patients, carers, and others passionate about improving health outcomes.

The Governing Board is very pleased to announce the launch of three new organizational policies to support everyone contributing to Cochrane. These policies are designed to help members understand their roles and responsibilities both to the organization and their colleagues; and to ensure that Cochrane complies with the highest standards of governance.

Principles of Collaboration: Working Together for Cochrane

Cochrane’s new Principles of Collaboration will act as a Code of Conduct for all members and supporters. Developed by the Council on behalf of the Governing Board, with input from a cross-section of the community, this new policy lays out the principles that promote a collegial environment and effective collaboration. It describes the kinds of behaviour expected of everyone interacting with the organization.

Complaints Resolution Procedure

This new procedure supports those involved in making and handling complaints by providing transparent, consistent principles and processes. Fundamental to this procedure is the principle that in the first instance complaints should be dealt with directly between the parties involved, and at the most local level possible thereafter. This recognises that the earlier and more directly a complaint is raised, the greater the chance of successfully resolving it.

Organizational Accountabilities

Being accountable means making a commitment to be responsible and answerable for your actions, and wherever possible, doing the things you make a commitment to do. In Cochrane, accountability applies at a personal and organizational level. Members and supporters make a commitment to treat each other with respect and fairness in carrying out work for Cochrane. Management and governance decision-making are transparent and explainable. Constructive criticism and debate are welcomed. This new policy sets out clearly, and in one place, the structures for managerial and governance accountability that already exist within the organization.

All of these policies are now available on the ‘Policies’ section of the Cochrane Community website. Over the coming months you’ll receive more information and training opportunities on how they can support you, and if you’re working for a Cochrane Group, how to implement them within your Group’s standard procedures. You are welcome to submit questions and comments about these new policies to the Governing Board at: support@cochrane.org.

With very best wishes,

Martin Burton
Governing Board Co-Chair

Catherine Marshall
Governing Board Co-Chair