Knowledge Translation Resources

Explaining Evidence-based Health Care with podcasts

In this series of short podcasts, our scientists will help you understand more about Evidence-based Health Care.

What is evidence-based health care? Dr Celeste Naude explains the 3 important principles of evidence-based health care.

Getting to grips with evidence: systematic reviews versus “cherry-picking” Anel Schoonees describes why systematic reviews are an important source of information in evidence-based health care.

Explaining Evidence-informed Policymaking with podcasts

In this series of short podcasts, our scientists will help you understand more about Evidence-informed Policymaking.

Researcher and policymaker engagement to enhance evidence informed policies. Prof Taryn Young explains how scientists and policymakers can work together to achieve better policies.

Clinical Guidelines

Clinical Guideline Resources

Clinical guidelines are systematically developed statements designed to help practitioners and patients decide on appropriate healthcare for specific clinical conditions and/or circumstances1. Evidence informed clinical guidelines follow a rigorous development process and are based on the highest quality scientific evidence. Find below a non- exhaustive list of helpful web-based resources on evidence informed clinical guidelines:

Quality of evidence and formulation of recommendations:

GRADE: The Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (short GRADE) Working Group began in the year 2000 as an informal collaboration of people with an interest in addressing the shortcomings of present grading systems in health care. The working group has developed a common, sensible and transparent approach to grading quality of evidence and strength of recommendations.
Download Gradepro® software from Cochrane collaboration website
GRADEpro® help file for Guideline developers
GRADE webinars, developed by the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics of McMaster University and in collaboration with the Cochrane Collaboration. These audio-visual presentations (between 8 and 20 minutes each) take you step by step through the process of GRADEing evidence from systematic reviews on questions of interventions.

Critical appraisal of guidelines:

AGREE: The Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE) Instrument evaluates the process of practice guideline development and the quality of reporting.

The AGREE Trust

Guideline adaptation:

Many clinical guidelines exist and The ADAPTE tool can be used to guide the adaptation of an international/national guideline to suit your local or specific context.

The ADAPTE Process: Resource Toolkit for Guideline Adaptation. Version 2.0.

International guideline development groups:

Training courses on guideline development:

See www.sun.ac.za/clinepi for details on a dedicated short course on Clinical guidelines

Guideline Implementability Research and Application Network (GIRAnet)

With funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and in partnership with the Guidelines International Network, the Guideline Implementability Research and Application Network (GIRAnet) promotes collaboration among guideline developers, implementers and researchers interested in implementability (www.g-i-n.net/activities/implementation/giranet). In plain language this means including information in or with guidelines that helps users to implement them. They are particularly interested in guideline implementability tools (GItools) that help users plan for, implement and evaluate use of guideline recommendations. GIRAnet identified, described and assembled exemplar guideline implementability tools (GItools) in a prototype GItool Directory which is publicly available and can be searched or browsed (http://giranet.org).

PDQ

PDQ-Evidence

PDQ-Database Database for quick access to high quality health system and public health evidence.

(Pretty Darn Quick) PDQ-Evidence is a new database that provides quick access to high quality health system and public health evidence. It includes systematic reviews and overviews of systematic reviews; primary studies included in those; and structured summaries.

Easy to search

The connections between the documents make PDQ-Evidence very easy and quick to search. For example, each systematic review is linked to all of the studies included in the review, to overviews and policy briefs that include the review, and to other systematic reviews that include any of the same studies. There are over 14,000 records in PDQ-Evidence, including over 1500 systematic reviews that fulfil basic quality criteria. These numbers are increasing weekly.

Health system and public health questions

We search multiple databases to identify systematic reviews and overviews of systematic reviews that address an explicit question about health systems or public (population) health. We include systematic reviews and overviews of systematic reviews of questions about health system problems, the effects of health system or population health interventions, barriers to and facilitators of those interventions, and the effects of implementation strategies. We also include access to structured summaries of studies, such as SUPPORT Summaries.

Developed by an international team to make access easy

The objective of PDQ-Evidence is to make relevant high quality research easy to find for anyone with a health system question. It is a non-commercial database, developed by health system researchers, designers and programmers from three continents, funded in part by the EU 7th framework and Norad. The database is maintained by the Evidence-Based Medicine Unit, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Continuing development of PDQ-Evidence is informed by feedback from users. Try it out! www.pdq-evidence.org

Need more information? www.pdq-evidence.org/en/about_us

We welcome your comments and feedback!

New features coming soon:

We’re working hard to make this site even better, and soon will be adding: more health system and public health evidence; translation of the interface and contents into French, Portuguese and Spanish; save searches, automatic updates, print search results or abstracts, and email search results or articles.

Would you like to know when new features are available?

Send your email to PDQ.evidence@nokc.no with the following subject: “Email notices of PDQ-Evidence”.

SUPPORT Summaries

SUPPORTsummaries.org is a database of structured summaries of the best and most relevant evidence from systematic reviews of health system interventions relevant to low-and middle-income countries. These summaries extract information from systematic reviews, evaluate the information and present it in a user-friendly manner so that decision-makers can quickly review the evidence and decide whether a particular innovation is likely to be effective in their own context