Identifying and filling the gaps in health promotion and public health research

Elizabeth Waters, Ginny Brunton, Faline Howes, Nicki Jackson, Jodie Doyle

The Health Promotion and Public Health Field’s role is to encourage and facilitate the production of high quality, high utility Cochrane reviews of health promotion and public health interventions. The Field is not an editorial group and thus not responsible for doing reviews. The Field plays a primary role in bringing the needs and the identified evidence gaps from the health promotion and public health community (including practitioners, consumers and policy makers) to Cochrane editorial groups.
This paper will describe the specific activities the HP&PH Field is undertaking to identify the gaps in systematic reviews on The Cochrane Library for public health practitioners, and other easily accessible databases of public health reviews. We will provide results of the outcomes of the Global Priorities Project in terms of dissemination and communication, recruitment of reviewers, funding, Cochrane entity feedback and problems encountered.
The presentation will highlight the issues faced by the Collaboration in priority setting and processes for involving stakeholders in decisions around topic selection and review content.

Ottawa 2004 O-032