The working party

Nancy Owens has joined the working party. She is working with the German Cochrane Centre on the website and puts most of the Evidence Aid documents onto the site. Steve McDonald has stepped down from the working party. There have been two teleconferences in recent months of the small group within the working party (Frank Archer, Mike Clarke, Paul Garner, Sally Green, Pisake Lumbiganon and Prathap Tharyan).

Cochrane Colloquium in Melbourne

The Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group has agreed that the Annual General Meetings of The Cochrane Collaboration and the Collaboration Trading Company can begin with a 10- minute presentation by Prathap Tharyan, Pisake Lumbiganon and Mike Clarke on the Collaboration’s response to the tsunami. This is at 4.00 pm on Sunday 23 October 2005. There will also be other opportunities during the plenary sessions at the Colloquium to discuss this issue.

There will be an open meeting to discuss Evidence Aid and the Collaboration’s response to the tsunami on Tuesday 25 October from 4.00 pm to 5.30 pm. People can sign up to attend this meeting through the Colloquium website.

Evidence Aid

There are now 21 Evidence Updates for Cochrane reviews available from Evidence Aid on The Cochrane Collaboration's website, with several more in draft form. The Australasian Cochrane Centre (Rebecca Ryan) and the Infectious Diseases Group (Paula Waugh) are continuing to work with the relevant Cochrane Review Groups and authors on these. There are also two summaries of the collection of Cochrane reviews relating to blood transfusion and intravenous fluids, prepared by Paul Chinnock before he left the Injuries Group.

All these summaries, and the relevant Cochrane reviews for those topics for which a summary is not yet ready, seem likely to be relevant in the aftermath of other natural disasters and healthcare emergencies, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, and the introductory pages for Evidence Aid have been edited to note this.

The website was updated after the publication of Issue 3, 2005 of The Cochrane Library to reflect the inclusion of relevant new and updated reviews in that issue.

Communication

The electronic version of the BMJ included a news story about Evidence Aid in April.

Presentations about The Cochrane Collaboration's response to the tsunami were made at the special WHO conference in Phuket, Thailand (Pisake Lumbiganon) and the World Association of Disaster and Emergency Medicine annual conference in Edinburgh, Scotland (Mike Clarke). Both of these meetings were in May.

An article about the Collaboration's response (Prathap Tharyan, Mike Clarke, Sally Green) was published in PLoS Medicine in June: ‘How The Cochrane Collaboration is responding to the Asian tsunami’. This journal is open access and so the article can be downloaded and shared for free. It is available here.

Evidence Aid was made 'Document of the week' in the National electronic Library for Health in the UK in mid-June.

Suggestions of reviews to prioritise

The spreadsheet showing the reviews and topics that have been identified as priorities is available in the Collaboration’s Information Management System (IMS), to facilitate its access by members of the working party. An edited version has now been placed on www.cochrane.org, showing the prioritised topics for which a Cochrane review is already available and the topics for which this is not yet so. This wider availability of the list should help draw attention to the evidence that is available and the large amount of work that remains to be done, and may also lead to additional suggestions for priority topics.

Prathap Tharyan and Pisake Lumbiganon went through the full list of priorities a few months ago and prepared the following top ten priorities for reviews:

+ Combinations of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy for depression
+ Exercise therapy for prevention and treatment of depression and anxiety in children and adolescents
+ SSRIs for depression in children and adolescents
+ Antidepressants for the elderly
+ Pharmacotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
+ Eye movement desensitisation for PTSD
+ Psychosocial interventions for preventing suicide in offenders
+ Interventions for supporting children through bereavement
+ Support or self-help groups for parents after the death of a child
+ Psychological therapies for bereaved adults

Resources for prioritised reviews

The Australasian Cochrane Centre, in association with its host institution Monash University in Melbourne, is exploring possible sources of funding for prioritised reviews. Suggestions on how to encourage potential funders from anywhere in the world to facilitate the preparation and updating of relevant reviews should be sent to Mike Clarke (MCL7097258@aol.com and mclarke@cochrane.co.uk).

Funding

A small amount of funding (about two hundred pounds sterling) is available from within the donations made by two schools in Oxford to The Cochrane Collaboration for its work in response to the tsunami. Suggestions for how this money might be spent or how more might be raised should be sent to Mike Clarke (MCL7097258@aol.com and mclarke@cochrane.co.uk).

Contact with other agencies

Discussions have taken place with the WHO (in particular the Research Policy and Cooperation and Health Action in Crises sections and the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse) about how The Cochrane Collaboration and WHO might co-operate in the future.