An enhanced Cochrane Library platform launch, huge increase in visits to Cochrane.org, and almost 1,300 contributors attend Cochrane’s Colloquium in Edinburgh, UK.

We are proud to present key highlights of Cochrane’s performance during July – September 2018 as part of our latest organizational Dashboard.

This important information consists of data on Strategy to 2020 target achievements, and key metrics around the Strategy’s four Goals, Producing evidence; Making our evidence accessible; Advocating for evidence; Building an effective sustainable organization.

This quarter, July- September 2018, saw the successful launch of the new Cochrane Library platform, redesigned with enhancements to improve user experience and functionality.

We are delighted to share other achievements across Cochrane during this period including:

• An astonishing 22% increase in Cochrane.org web sessions since Quarter II 2018, that’s a 99% increase in Cochrane.org web sessions since a year ago.

• Usage in some countries (Japan, Mexico, Brazil) showing even more significant growth

• 22% increase in Cochrane supporters since Quarter II

• Major increases in year on year members of Cochrane Crowd (44%), users of Task Exchange (89%)  and Covidence (65%)

• Nearly 1,300 delegates attend a hugely successful Patients Included Cochrane Colloquium in Edinburgh, UK.

View Cochrane’s organizational performance in more detail in PDF format

If you would like further information on Cochrane’s organizational data and information, please contact Sarah Darbyshire Evans (sdarbyshireevans@cochrane.org)

The Colloquium is Cochrane's annual flagship event, bringing people together from around the world to discuss research into important global health questions and to promote evidence-informed health care. This year, the Colloquium took place in Edinburgh, UK, in September and was hosted by Cochrane UK. Almost 1300 people from 57 countries attended. The theme was ‘Cochrane for all - better evidence for better health decisions.’  It was a Patients Included event, co-designed, co-produced and co-presented by healthcare consumers.

This year’s Colloquium gala dinner was held at the National Museum of Scotland. Guests enjoyed their meal in the Grand Gallery, followed by traditional Scottish music, a ceilidh and a disco.

In order to guarantee their place at the dinner, guests were asked to make a charitable donation at the time of registration. These donations were promised to Social Bite, a national Social Enterprise in Scotland dedicated to tackling homelessness. We are delighted to have raised £9,880 for this cause.

Social Bite invite their homeless customers into their chain of sandwich shops to enjoy homemade food and hot drinks throughout the day. Among other ventures, they also hold a series of ‘social supporter’ events in the evenings, including nights for refugees and ‘women’s only’ nights for homeless women. Social Bite have also secured 800 homes for their first Housing Initiative. This plans to take a minimum of 800 people out of homelessness and into a proper home with fully funded support over the next 18 months.

After learning of the donation raised from the gala dinner, Jamie Boyd, Head of Event Fundraising at Social Bite passed on this message: 

“Your gift will make such a difference to the lives of the many homeless people we support.  Thanks to the generosity of our supporters, like yourselves, we are able to distribute over 100,000 items of food and hot drinks every year to Scotland’s most vulnerable people… Support such as yours gives the small team at Social Bite great hope that together we can end homelessness and we thank you once again”.

 To learn more about Social Bite watch this short video:   

Dear Cochrane Members,
 
Voting is now open for the current Governing Board election.

Visit elections.cochrane.org to view the candidates standing, read their Candidate Statements, and cast your votes.

We’ll be sending a series of reminders before voting closes on 10 December 2018 at 12:00 GMT. Next week on the Cochrane Community website, we’ll be interviewing the candidates about their motivation to stand for election, providing you with another opportunity to get to know candidates before voting.

All members as defined by the Membership Terms & Conditions are entitled to vote in this election. To check your membership status, please see https://join.cochrane.org/your-membership. If you have questions about your status, you can email membership@cochrane.org.

Questions about any aspects of the elections process can be raised with Lucie Binder, Senior Advisor to the CEO (Governance & Management) and Electoral Officer for this election.

The Cochrane Review Network communities announce their strategic plans that will guide the work of our Cochrane Review Groups (CRGS) until 2020

The Cochrane Review Group (CRG) Networks within Cochrane, each have a Network team comprising of a Senior Editor, Associate Editor and a Network Support Fellow – see here for more information on their structure and function.

Now, following comprehensive consultation and finalization with their CRG community at Cochrane’s Edinburgh Colloquium in September, the Network’s Senior and Associate Editors are delighted to announce their strategic plans that will guide their work over the next two years:

• Acute and Emergency Care
• Brain, Nerves and Mind
• Cancer
• Children and Families
• Circulation and Breathing
• Long-term Conditions and Ageing
• Musculoskeletal, Oral Skin and Sensory
• Public Health and Health Systems

The CRG Network’s Strategic Plans are based on five key objectives:

1. Supporting Cochrane review production and capacity
2. Evaluating Network scope and prioritization of topics
3. Fostering collaboration within the Network and with the wider Cochrane community
4. Supporting knowledge translation to increase the impact of Cochrane reviews
5. Ensuring accountability and sustainability of the Network

This is an exciting new development for Cochrane, working collectively to improve review production and editorial processes, which in turn aim to improve the quality of Cochrane reviews. These strategic plans also mean that the review questions chosen are the right ones for professionals, patients and policymakers, and are prioritized through interaction with relevant stakeholders, leading to higher impact in adoption in health guidelines and policies in the future.

We will regularly monitor and evaluate the implementation of these strategic plans and will publish our results with the Cochrane community every three months.

We would like to sincerely thank the Cochrane CRG community for their hard work in devising these plans and we are energized to support you all in implementing these exciting and innovative activities during the coming years.

Karla Soares-Weiser
Cochrane's Deputy Editor in Chief

Making Cochrane evidence accessible to non-English speakers is a priority for us. More than 5,000 translations of Cochrane Review plain language summaries/abstracts were published in 2017. Translation activities are led by local Cochrane groups and their translator communities, the majority of which are volunteer based.

This is why translation teams and geographical centres play a key role in Cochrane’s knowledge translation strategy. During the 25th Cochrane Colloquium in Edinburgh some of the members of the Cochrane Community shared with us their goals and achievements in different language settings.

A warm thank you to all our wonderful translation teams - we are very proud of the work we have accomplished and excited about what is to come!

• Find out more about our translations projects
• Help translate Cochrane evidence

Following a period of nominations, we’re very pleased that 18 candidates are standing for election to the Governing Board in this election. They are listed on elections.cochrane.org and here you can read more about the them, why they’re standing for election, and what they plan to do for Cochrane if elected.

There are four (4) positions available on the Board for this election, which is open to Cochrane Members. Candidates do not have to be a leader of a Cochrane Group and the Board is looking for a diverse and international range of candidates. Voting will open on 22 November 2018 and close on 10 December 2018 (12:00 GMT).

All members as defined by the Membership Terms & Conditions will be entitled to vote in the election. To check your membership status, please see https://join.cochrane.org/your-membership. If you have questions about your status, you can email membership@cochrane.org. Instructions on how to vote will be sent to you on 22 November 2018.

Cochrane places high regard on minimizing bias, promoting access, and enabling wide participation. For these reasons, canvassing for specific candidates is prohibited. It should be noted that:

• Any Cochrane individual, Group or committee may encourage members to participate in elections without endorsing specific candidates;
• Cochrane leaders or leadership committees (such as Executives) should not publicly endorse specific candidates.

Questions about any aspects of the elections process, or concerns about a candidate’s eligibility, can be raised with Lucie Binder, Senior Advisor to the CEO (Governance & Management) and Electoral Officer for this election.

Best wishes to all candidates standing!

A group of Cochrane members recently submitted a letter to the Board detailing "four major policy issues for Cochrane".

You’re invited to read their letter and the Board’s response.

To learn more about the Cochrane Council, the organization’s representative body for Cochrane members, please visit their section.

Registration for the 2019 Governance Meetings in Krakow, Poland is now open. Find out more about:

• Full programme for the 31 March - 5 April
• Venue and location
• Hotel options nearby
• Registration details

Full details are available on our events pages, here.

It’s been a busy time for the Working Group looking at ‘Improving and Upscaling’ Knowledge Translation (KT) Products since the Community Survey over the summer. In this blog we look at the results of the survey and our plans for the future.

Infographics, blogshots, policy briefings, press releases and videos… these are just some examples of KT products that Cochrane groups are using in order to try to ensure that the evidence is available to the people who need it in a format in which they can use it for health decision making. Over the summer the members involved in the KT Working Group looking at developing KT products ran a survey open to all of the Cochrane Community. The survey tried to identify what products are currently being used by people in Cochrane, which products people have had good results with, and what we can learn from great KT products outside Cochrane. 

The survey had 77 responses, from 32 countries. Responders came from across the Cochrane community with six Cochrane Fields, 16 Cochrane Review Groups and 17 Geographically orientated groups submitting an official response.  The results showed that a wide range of different methods are already being used to share Cochrane evidence with the most popular being updating the website, developing and sharing blogshots, and presenting evidence at conferences. Unsurprisingly social media is a big deal! Most groups are using Twitter and Facebook to spread the word, with other social media platforms popular in specific regions around the world.

Current and planned use of social media across all survey participants

Some of the major messages that came through the survey included that respondents were:

• eager to develop KT products themselves but felt there was a lack of time, resources and support for doing this. They requested more guidance and templates to help them.
• particularly interested to know more about developing included infographics, blogshots, Cochrane corners, videos, podcasts, and using Wikipedia more
• interested in developing skills to be able to create communication strategies and at getting better at using Social Media
• keen to know more about how to evaluate and track the impact of KT products produced

So what’s next? The Working Group has reviewed the results and will be working on a number of projects over the coming months.  These include:

• developing ‘dissemination kits’ for different audiences including templates and guidance for KT products and platforms such as blogshots, press releases, Facebook and Twitter.
• webinars to enable groups to use social media more effectively
• piloting the use of infographics for specific reviews
• developing tools and training to explore the ‘basic principles of dissemination’

New resources will produced over the coming months and will be additions to the existing ‘Disseminating Cochrane Evidence’ section of the KT resources website. 

KT Working Group have already made some resources available on the website, including advice on making effective use of social media, how to communicate evidence to journalists, resources for presenting work at conferences and help to produce multimedia materials like podcasts and videos. Take some time to browse through all our great resources on disseminating Cochrane evidence - and check back often as we will be adding more!

Thank you for all your help responding to the survey, and please get in touch by emailing support@cochrane.org if you have any comment or ideas.

Anne Littlewood
Karen Head
Francesca Gimigliano