Tag: cochrane

#revScreen – Cochrane Crowd Challenges on home visiting and medical education

Previously I blogged about the addictive nature of EMBASE Screening. This is now rebranded as Cochrane Crowd, but the overall approach is unchanged – the user assesses abtracts to see if they are RCTs/CCTs or not. It it surprisingly addictive.

cochrane crowd logo

 

Anyhow, there are two new Cochrane tasks – screening for RCTs for two specific reviews Home visiting for socially disadvantaged mothers, and  Interventions for improving medical students’ interpersonal communication in medical consultation. 

If any readers are interested in these areas, the Cochrane Crowd process exposes one to a wide range of (at times rather tenuously related) studies and papers on the topic… I tend to get sidetracked easily.

Anyhow, here is the email:

Dear all,

 

We need your help!

 

When you next log into Cochrane Crowd you will be able to see two new ‘tasks’ in your dashboard area. One is for an update of a review entitled: Home visiting for socially disadvantaged mothers, and the other is for a new review, called: Interventions for improving medical students’ interpersonal communication in medical consultations.

 

The searches for each of these reviews has identified between 3000-5000 records. The core author team for each review has come toCochrane Crowd asking if this community can help. I think we can.

 

Before you dive in, here are some questions you might have:

 

What do I need to do that is different from the usual RCT screening task?

Absolutely nothing. The task is exactly the same making you very well qualified to help! We want all the randomized or quasi-randomized trials to be identified even if the trial has nothing to do with the topic of the review.

 

What’s in it for me?

For those who screen 250 or more records, your contribution will be acknowledged in the review for which you contributed. In addition, on one of the reviews, the home visiting review, the review team will reward authorship to the top screener. This will be based not just on the amount you screen but the accuracy of your screening.

 

How long will these tasks be posted for?

We’ve set the deadline for 31st March. It would be fantastic to have both sets of records screened by that date.

 

Who can I contact if I have any questions or queries?

You can either contact me, Anna, (anna.noel-storr@rdm.ox.ac.uk) or my brilliant colleague, Emily (crowd@cochrane.org) and we’ll try and get back to you as quickly as possible.

 

Do I need to let anyone know if I plan to contribute or not?

No, you don’t need to let us know either way. If you want to contribute to either or both reviews, just log into Crowd and get cracking! We’ll know who has taken part. Likewise, if this just isn’t for you or you don’t think you’ll have the time, that’s absolutely fine; you don’t need to let us know.

 

When can I start?

Right now! Go and make a nice cup of tea and hop over to Cochrane Crowd (http://crowd.cochrane.org). Log in as usual and you should see the two new tasks. I think I’ll head there now myself.

If you’re a twitterer, we’ll be using #RevScreen for these two exciting pilots!

 

With best wishes to all and happy citation screening,

 

 

Anna and Emily

 

Cochrane Crowd

 

I have finished Evidence Based Medicine (for a while)

This evening, I logged on to do some Embase screening:

embase

Noting that there were a mere 100 records to screen, I worked away for a while, until:

embaseoneleft

 

With bated breath I screen the one remaining record (naturally enough, a Reject verdict), and after a bit of deliberation clicked on “Save and Exit”, to discover that :

victoryembase

 

Of course, I know that a gigantic batch of records will no doubt be delivered to Embase for screening, if it hasn’t already (and I am probably misunderstanding something even more basic) but, for the moment, there is a pleasing sensation of having reached the ultimate extreme of human knowledge (only mild hyperbole here!)

#TRIALSYM15

The original purpose of this blog was as an entirely personal, reflective project. In the last few weeks (not that the blog has a history before this) it has become a forum for my reflections on events I have attended of a general medical innovation bent -the AMEE Hackathon and a CCIO meeting.  And now it is the turn of the inaugural Clinical Trials Methodology Symposium of the HRB’s brand new Trials Methodology Research Network. I only attended day 1 of this event which is a pity. The hashtag #trialsym15 is being used on Twitter so proceedings can be followed there. I won’t try and summarise proceedings here as it would be a little too much “he said… she said…” but give some reflective thoughts, especially following on from my prior posts.

As a full time clinician with an aspirational interest in research (ie a desire to take part in it that is often foiled) I find the concept of a network very appealing, and having an interest in conceptual issues in mental health and illness the methodology element is also fascinating.   It is rather invidious to select highlights; one was Sir Iain Chalmers , a founder of the Cochrane Collaboration (the logo of which incorporates a metaanalysis performed by an Irish doctor, Patricia Crowley ) who in a fascinating talk showed how, contrary to what is often taught, the randomised controlled trial did not emerge in 1948 from statistical theory but from a much longer history of clinical researchers engaging in fair trials of treatment.

Another was NUI Galway’s John Newell who gave the most engaging talk by a statistician I have ever heard

(his NUIG bio photo is also pleasingly Action Man-y)  john_newell

Newell gave a really honest and inspirational talk on translational statistics, and conveying statistical concepts to non-statistician audiences. I also learned about an egregious misuse of statistics by no less a moral authority than Fintan O’Toole … in a rather self-righteous article decrying the misuse of statistics. “The most entertaining talk I ever heard by a statistician” probably sounds like a set-up for a joke, but actually statisticians in my experience tend to be a wry lot. Newell’s talk really was the most entertaining talk I ever heard by a statistician.

I also enjoyed the total absence of the words “transform” or “revolutionise.” This was a particularly evident absence in Prof Craig Ramsay’s  witty, optimistic-yet-realistic presentation on  implementation science or knowledge transfer or (insert current description of this field here) . I had to pop out for a call towards the end (see the passing comment on not having time to do research above!) and, lurking at the door afterwards, was interested to hear him discuss developing research teams integrated into clinical settings. This chimed with some of my thoughts on the technology-health interface discussed towards the end of my Glasgow Hackathon post

The dynamic between technology and healthcare (and technology and education) is becoming one of the themes of these blog posts. My Glasgow experience made me wonder if the dynamic is, almost irretrievably, biased towards the tech being in the driving seat. I was more reassured by the CCIO meeting and even more impressed today by the amount of thought going into methodology by the likes of Prof Ramsay and the COMET Initiative .

Another highlight was Prof Peter Sandercock’s at times harrowing account of the travails of the International Stroke Trial and an illustration of the downside of social media and healthcare’s interaction. A questioner asked him about his current thoughts on pharma and drug trials. To paraphrase his reply, he said that he worried less about pharma influence, which is now highly scrutinised and regulated, than the medical device industry, which is not to anything like the same degree.

This got me thinking again about the deification of tech, or rather a certain kind of tech. Big Pharma is now a regular movie villain, whereas medical devices are Good Tech and therefore only criticised by fogeys. As it happened, during the day I came across a blog post by my  friend Phil Lawton  which, in dealing with the recent move of the Web Summit from Dublin, captured many of my own thoughts not only about the uncritical adoration of tech, but also about Dublin itself – especially as a Dublin native now happily domiciled a long long way away in Tipperary.