Systematic Reviews of Interventions Teaching Evidence Assimilation for Collaborative Healthcare

As with any research, the first and most important decision in preparing a systematic review is to determine its focus. This is best done by clearly framing the questions the review seeks to answer. Well-formulated questions will guide many aspects of the review process, including determining eligibility criteria, searching for studies, and collecting data from included studies. This workshop will address Review question and Eligibility criteria, Searching for studies, Selecting studies and collecting data.

Problems with the design and execution of individual studies of healthcare interventions raise questions about the validity of their findings; empirical evidence provides support for this concern. In clinical trials, biases can be broadly categorized as selection bias, performance bias, detection bias, attrition bias, reporting bias and other biases that do not fit into these categories.

This workshop will cover Types of data and effect measures, Summarizing effects across studies, Heterogeneity, Subgroup analyses and Sensitivity analyses.

This workshop will cover Types of reporting biases and the Funnel plots.

This workshop will address first one of the key aspects of interpreting findings: the quality of evidence related to each of the outcomes.  We then provide a consideration of issues around applicability and around interpretation of numerical results, and provide suggestions for presenting authors’ conclusions.