Background: The Cochrane Effective Practice and Organisation of Care (EPOC) review group focuses on reviews of interventions designed to improve health care delivery and health care systems. These reviews address a range of organisational, financial, regulatory and professional interventions, and are highly relevant to health policy-making - in Australia as elsewhere.

Compared to systematic reviews of clinical interventions, however, EPOC reviews tend to be complex, due in part to the greater propensity for effects to be influenced by subtle variations in the characteristics of the intervention, its delivery and the setting in which it is applied. Furthermore, these types of interventions may be difficult to study with a rigorous research methodology, they may be challenging to standardize and control and they tend to be poorly described in primary efficacy studies. These potential problems with the primary studies of complex intervention lead to further problems when one attempts to systematically review and synthesize the available evidence. As a result, to make EPOC reviews useful for policy-makers, the review group has developed additional methodologies, provides mentorship and specialised reviewer support, and is particularly interested in making reviews relevant to policy-makers in different contexts.

Strategy: This paper describes the current level of EPOC activities within Australia, as well as initiatives to enhance this activity, and the incorporation of EPOC review findings into Australian health policy. We examine the number of reviews relevant to Australasian health care system, the characteristics of Australasian reviews and reviewers, support provided from the EPOC editorial base, including liaison with other stakeholders, and the establishment and roles of an Australian EPOC satellite. The actual and potential contributions of EPOC reviews to national policy are then discussed.