Background:

The Australian NHMRC-funded Centre for Research Excellence for Improving health services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aims to provide evidence-informed practices through evidence synthesis. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter respectfully referred to as Aboriginal) children are a particularly vulnerable group within Australia with poorer health and social outcomes compared to non-Aboriginal children. Developing Cochrane and other evidence-synthesis reviews that have direct relevance and impact for Aboriginal children and their families is important for improving health and wellbeing.

Objectives:

To discuss how our programme of evidence synthesis has been developed to ensure Aboriginal communities and stakeholders are involved in our work.

Methods and Results:

As part of standard practice, researchers work with Aboriginal communities to ensure research is actually needed within communities and is respectfully delivered. We have used a range of methods to ensure our evidence-synthesis programme delivers high-quality, equitable reviews. These include:
• engaging Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations that represent the community;
• developing steering and project advisory groups as part of our Cochrane reviews to provide consumers with input into outcomes and summary of findings tables;
• working with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers to increase capacity to complete evidence-synthesis reviews including Cochrane and non-Cochrane systematic reviews and scoping reviews; and,
• completing preliminary investigations with families and service providers prior to initiating evidence-synthesis reviews.

Conclusions:

Evidence synthesis, particularly Cochrane reviews, have been successful in influencing policy and practice to improve programme sustainability and health outcomes for Aboriginal people. However, there are acknowledged barriers that result in poor uptake of evidence-synthesis outcomes. We describe a number of processes which can be easily incorporated into reviews to ensure reviews are important and of relevance to the communities they may assist.