Background: Progress is slow in achieving the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which include the reduction of child and maternal mortality. In low and middle income countries (LMIC) each year, eleven million children die before their fifth birthday and 529,000 women die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth. LMIC have limited resources with which to address these problems, and yet a substantial portion of these resources may be used for interventions whose effectiveness is unknown or disproved. In addition, effective interventions and policies may be underused. Achieving the MDGs requires well-informed selection and implementation of effective healthcare interventions and policies. Collaboration between decision makers and researchers is necessary to accomplish this.
Objectives: The aim of the SUPPORT (SUPporting Policy Relevant Reviews and Trials) Collaboration is to improve the use of reliable research evidence in policy and management decisions on maternal and child health, and to help fill in the gaps where there is a lack of reliable evidence.
Methods: Building on two existing networks with experience in research and linkage to policy-making, the SUPPORT Collaboration will: (1) Prepare summaries of current best evidence on the effectiveness of relevant interventions in a way that is easily accessible to decision makers; (2) Develop tools to support access to and use of research evidence to inform policy decisions; (3) Develop tools to support the conduct of pragmatic trials of interventions when reliable evidence is lacking; and (4) Disseminate these tools and provide support for the appropriate use of reliable research evidence.
Results: Since the inception of the project in October 2006, we have identified (a) the leading causes of under-five and maternal mortality in LMIC and (b) preventive and therapeutic interventions for addressing these conditions, and will prepare structured summaries on these interventions for a policy maker audience. These causes and interventions were identified from the report of global burden of disease study and a series of landmark publications on maternal, child, and neonatal survival. In addition, we have conducted a policy-maker workshop in Rosario (Argentina) and are finalizing plans for one in Harare (Zimbabwe). The workshops consist of interactive presentations and working group sessions during which policy-makers are assisted in developing skills to frame a health problem, identify trials/systematic reviews, and assess the quality and local applicability of a trial or systematic review. The policy-makers are thus empowered to become informed users of research-based evidence, and each workshop ends with an evaluation. During the conference presentation, we will provide up-to-date outputs of the SUPPORT Collaboration.
Conclusions: The SUPPORT Collaboration provides a model of how multi-national collaborations can be configured and how efficiencies can be gained from cross-continental linkages.