Over the past two decades, the International Cochrane Collaboration has completely transformed the mechanism of health decision-making. Cochrane aims to collect, summarize and disseminate the best current research evidence via The Cochrane Library in order to help stakeholders making informed health care decisions. Cochrane began with just a few dozen volunteers and has, over the years, transformed into a truly global and inclusive network, with 37 000 contributors from over 130 countries. Cochrane evidence has long been recognized as high quality and trustworthy international gold standard in health care. In recent years, Cochrane has initiated a number of innovative projects to attract more researchers from different socio-cultural and educational backgrounds. This commentary introduces these new platforms and illustrates the opportunities offered to Chinese researchers by the modern-era Cochrane.
Objective To evaluate the effect of physician-nurse-pharmacist collaboration on cardiovascular disease risk factors in diabetes patients. Methods Randomized controlled trails (RCTs) on collaboration among physicians, nurses and pharmacists for reducing cardiovascular disease risk factors in diabetes patients were collected from Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Medline (Ovid SP), Embase, China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database, VIP and WanFang. We screened the retrieved studies according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, evaluated the quality of included studies, and then performed meta-analysis with the Cochrane Collaboration’s Revman 5.3.0 software. Results Seven RCTs were included. The results of meta-analysis showed that the change in glycosylated hemoglobin A1c, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure and low density lipoprotein-cholesterol were significantly reduced in the collaboration group than in usual care group [SMD=–0.39, 95%CI (–0.56, –0.21),P<0.000 1;SMD=–0.30, 95%CI (–0.43, –0.18),P<0.000 01;SMD=–0.37, 95%CI (–0.64, –0.11),P=0.006;SMD=–0.11, 95%CI (–0.16, –0.06),P<0.000 1]. Conclusions Collaboration among physicians, nurses and pharmacists is effective for reducing cardiovascular disease risk factors in diabetes patients. But its long-term efficacy still needs to be confirmed by performing higher quality, large sample RCTs with long-term follow-up.
In the context of collaboration between healthcare and education systems, in order to promote competency-oriented medical education reform and improve the clinical capabilities of medical students at all levels, it is urgent to enhance the organizational guarantee to establish a stable teaching team in university-affiliated hospitals. As the National Clinical Teaching and Training Demonstration Center, West China School of Medicine / West China Hospital of Sichuan University has taken the lead to explore the building of a full-time teaching team for clinical practice teaching, innovating and implementing the system of “Full-time Practice Teaching Post”. This innovative measure ensures the whole-process management, teaching, and assessment of medical students, strengthens teacher training and top-level design of teaching and research, improves the incentive mechanism for teachers, applies multiple teaching resources and novel teaching methods, and finally improves the quality and culture of clinical practice teaching.
The Campbell Collaboration is an international nonprofit academic organization which concerns about production, storage and transmission high quality systematic reviews of the effects of social interventions, and it is called the sister organization of Cochrane Collaboration. Now the thinking and methods of Evidence-based medicine has been widely used in the field of clinical medicine, but its application in non-clinical medicine fields such as education and social area is rarely understood and used. This paper introduced the writing procedures and techniques of Campbell Systematic Review (C2SR), and to make the researchers preliminary understand how to resolve the problems in non-clinical field using the systematic review, and to encourage researchers try to use and write C2SR.
Systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare interventions are now quite common. There are currently more than 2 600 full Cochrane reviews in The Cochrane Library, with protocols published for 1 600 more. There are also thousands of systematic reviews published in other journals. However, the science of systematic reviewing is still relatively young. Most of the reviews available today rely on randomised trials, but there are also some reviews of non-randomised trials and of diagnostic test accuracy and these may become more common in the next few years. In this essay, I discuss some of the challenges of doing these newer types of systematic review, and show how experience gained in the last few decades of systematic reviews of randomised trials might help to meet these challenges.
Chris Silagy is the Chair of The Cochrane Collaboration between 1996 and 1998, and the founder as well as the first Director of the Australasian Cochrane Centre. He helped to establish the Chinese Cochrane Centre. He has made great contributions to the establishment and development of The Cochrane Collaboration to which he devoted his whole life. Though he died at the early age of 41, his optimism, great energy and b responsibility have left deep impression and inspiration to every one around him.
Running an infection control regular meeting is an effective way to develop and improve the communication between the infection control team and clinical units. This paper introduces the infection control regular monthly meeting which is held in the last week of each month in a newly-opened branch hospital of a university teaching hospital in China. Through collecting the issues for discussion beforehand, feeding back the surveillance data of last month including nosocomial infection, hand hygiene, multidrug-resistant organisms, occupational exposure, and medical waste, discussing the current infection control issues from each ward and trying to solve them together, and delivering and sharing new knowledge, skills, and information in terms of infection control, the monthly meeting achieves remarkable successes in the aspects of promoting the hospital infection control-related cultural construction, enhancing the supervision and implementation of infection control measures, and running new projects on hospital infection management, etc. Infection control regular monthly meeting builds up a study and work platform, promotes the multidisciplinary and multi-department communication and collaboration, and improves the quality of infection control eventually.