Background:

Evidence synthesis is an emerging field in health departments of states from Brazil which requires training of human resources to support decision-making processes. Brazil is a large country with economic disparities and sociocultural inequalities. So, there is a need for educational strategies to improve professional abilities and to disseminate evidence-based practices.

Objective:

To describe the performance of professionals from the five regions of the country in evidence synthesis courses before and after participating in an on-line training program.

Methods:

Participants from 27 Health State Departments engaged in the proposed training program about evidence synthesis, who are composed by the courses: Health Evidence-Based encompassing basic epidemiological concepts and their application in evidence-based health-science, lasting 40 hours; Introduction to systematic review and meta-analysis, dealing with concepts of systematic review, meta-analysis and tools for the assessment of quality research and certainty of evidence (AMSTAR-2 and GRADE approach, respectively), lasting 16 hours; and Critical evaluation of studies, which teaches main types of risk of bias of clinical trials and tools for their assessment, lasting 20 hours.
The courses were offered on an on-line educational platform and composed of educational program content, video classes, and reading material. Each participant answered an objective questionnaire at the beginning and at the end of completing each course. Data was grouped by region in the evidence synthesis courses and presented as mean (standard deviation; SD).

Results:

222 professionals completed all courses of evidence synthesis. All participants improved their performance in the tests after the course. As demonstrated in figure 1, the best performance observed was in the “Critical evaluation of studies” course, in which there was a 49.8% gain in general knowledge. The northern region showed the greatest gain in knowledge in “Evidence-based health” (47%), “Introduction to Systematic Review” (53%) and “Critical evaluation of studies” (54%) courses.

Conclusions:

After participating in the proposed training program, all five regions of the country showed knowledge gains above 33% in evidence synthesis courses. This demonstrates that the format used by the program can be an effective strategy for professional training in this area.