Challenges for conducting rapid reviews for health policy and guideline development

Article type
Authors
Bhaumik S1, Lassi Z2
1The George Institute for Global Health
2University of Adelaide
Abstract
Background:
Rapid reviews are increasingly being used for informing policy, technical documents and guidelines in the public health arena. The World Health Organization released a practical guide for conduct of rapid reviews late last year. Other than this, there is little guidance on rapid reviews and approaches to resolve various challenges during their conduct.

Objectives:
To understand the diversity of challenges encountered while conducting rapid reviews and possible approaches for managing them.

Description:
We will use an open-fishbowl approach for the workshop. The open-fishbowl approach is a participatory approach for conversation in which chairs will be arranged in concentric circles, with an inner circle of 4-55 chairs, to form a fishbowl. Initially the moderators will introduce the topic and discuss challenges they have faced during the conduct of rapid reviews while sitting in the fishbowl. Any workshop participants can occupy empty chairs in the fishbowl and join the discussion. When the fishbowl is full an existing member must voluntarily free a chair. The discussion continues with participants continuously entering and leaving the bowl (with one chair always remaining empty).
We chose the open-fishbowl workshop approach to enable participation of patients and consumers whose opinions are often lost to tokenism in workshops and panel discussions.
The discussion will be free flowing and aim to encompass not only technical issues, but also operational and managerial issues, in the conduct of systematic reviews. We plan to document the results of the fishbowl conversation in the form of a report.