Background: Despite the best efforts of the author and some other interested faculties at the Fiji School of Medicine to participate in a Cochrane collaboration review for the past sometime, no success had been achieved in this direction, either individually, or at the institution level. This is despite the fact that schools library regularly subscribes to Cochrane collaboration and makes it freely available to its users. This prompted the need to review the experiences of motivated academicians and other professionals in a resource limited or developing country settings like Fiji who did not succeed in the past. An effort has been made to analyse some of the factors that leads to failure of these efforts, or even failure to make an attempt towards such goal.

Objectives: Specific objective for this activity has been to get feed back from fellow academicians and colleagues for their reasons. Some of them have attempted individually to open channels of communication with established Cocharane centres in the region. Others had used Cochrane reviews for references, policy decisions, or for academic reasons.

Methods: Informal survey, specific discussions, and interviews have been conducted into factors that act as hindrance to achieve such goal.

Results: Resource constrains has come up as the main factor for faculty s inability to actively participate in Cochrane collaboration s activities. Up until last year, Internet access had been a major limiting factor, when Fiji School of Medicine had been sharing the band width with another institution, slowing the speed. Limited faculty numbers, lack of exposure and lesser interaction with Cochrane groups in Australia and New Zealand are some of the other reasons given. Over commitment and lack of motivation are other factors, especially the hospital colleagues gave as the reason for their unwilling ness to participate. Ignorance about the actual procedure, commitment in terms of time and efforts, and unfamiliarity with review protocols are some of the other reasons. Speakers of english as second language has also made some of the faculties hesitant in taking an active role.

Conclusion: Many of the persons interviewed admitted accessing and using the Cochrane reviews. Despite being accessed and praised by most of the interviewees, it is often difficult to establish links with collaborating centres, and actively participate in its activities for an assortment of reasons. Pacific institutions face the similar limitations across the region, such as limited or no Internet access, physical remote locations, and low numbers of faculties to participate is such activities, or establishing regular continuing professional development activities, despite being the need for them.