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The South Asian Cochrane Network: supporting reviewers in South Asia and contributing to the global Cochrane agenda |
Background:
The Australasian Cochrane Centre (ACC) is currently the reference centre for Australia, South East Asia, South Asia, New Zealand and the Pacific. In response to a growing need to have a regional branch, the ACC supported the formation of the South Asian Cochrane Network (SACN) to cater to the training and support needs of people from South Asia.
Objectives:
To document the formation and the goals of the SACN
Methods:
Through 2004, we conducted 11 awareness raising workshops on systematic reviews, meta-analysis and the Cochrane Collaboration and held two protocol development workshops. A website and mailing list was set up. A survey of the contact database identified around 50 review authors and five review group editors. An exploratory meeting was held at Goa in India in December 2004 to formalize the structure and functioning of the SACN.
Results:
Twenty five people from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, the ACC and the Cochrane Steering Group attended the exploratory meeting and formally established the SACN on December 18, 2004 as a branch of the ACC. The SACN currently comprises eight network sites in India, two in Pakistan and one each in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh with a coordinating center in India. The five goals of the strategic plan of the SACN are to: raise awareness about the Cochrane Collaboration and evidence based practice, train and support contributors to the Cochrane Collaboration, promote access to The Cochrane Library, ensure a sustainable structure for the SACN and represent and advocate for high quality research in South Asia. We also hope to identify and contribute reports of published and unpublished trials from South Asian health care journals and databases to the Collaboration’s central register of controlled trials.
Conclusion:
The SACN hopes to provide access for the Collaboration to a pool of trained reviewers in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Increasing the proportion of systematic review authors from the region can help focus Cochrane reviews on interventions that are relevant to healthcare of people in South Asia and other resource constrained settings.