Do Cochrane systematic reviews help decision makers from middle income countries? Update of the Chilean experience

Article type
Authors
Rada G, Capurro D, Pantoja T, Letelier L, Moreno G
Abstract
Background: Chile has been facing a health system reform since 2000 in which 56 health conditions have been prioritized. Policy-makers need the best evidence to decide on the efficacy of interventions for these conditions. Systematic Reviews (SR) of RCTs represent the best quality evidence for questions about efficacy, and The Cochrane Collaboration is committed to making them widely available. In 2006, we reported the availability of Cochrane SRs (CSRs) for clinical questions related to the first 27 health conditions of our health reform. In 2007, 29 additional conditions were included. Objectives: To update the information on to what extent CSRs respond to the needs of policy-makers in the Chilean health reform. Methods: In order to gather the best evidence about the efficacy of specific interventions for the prioritized health conditions, we created Patient-Intervention-Comparison-Outcome (PICO) questions and developed a search strategy for each of them. We searched for SRs in The Cochrane Library (Issue 1, 2007) and MEDLINE simultaneously. One researcher conducted all searches and scanned the hits to select those matching the questions. A second researcher decided about fulfillment of inclusion criteria. We are presenting a descriptive analysis of the SRs and CSRs found. Results: We searched SRs for 65 PICO questions. Of the 154 SRs found, 31% were CSRs. Fourty-five questions (69%) had at least one SR. Nine questions (14%) had only CSRs, 15 (23%) had only non-CSRs and 21 (32%) had both. CSRs covered 29 (45%) of the 65 questions for which evidence was searched. The topics best represented by the CDSR were asthma (8 CSR), hormonal replacement therapy (6 CSR) and respiratory distress in the newborn, hepatic failure and epilepsy (3 CSR for each of them). Under-represented areas were ophthalmology, oncology and oral health. Conclusions: CSRs covered nearly half of the questions for the selected topics in our health reform. In that sense, The Cochrane Library represents an important source in informing policy options about the effects of interventions to be implemented in our health system. However, important areas are still under-represented.