Membership of the working party

The following people have agreed to join the working party: Xavier Bonfill (IberoAmerican Cochrane Centre; and Convenor, Developing Countries Initiative), Paul Chinnock (Cochrane Injuries Group), Chris Del Mar (Cochrane Acute Respiratory Infections Group) and Nick Royle (Chief Executive Officer, The Cochrane Collaboration).

Organisation of the working party

A teleconference of the small group (Frank Archer, Mike Clarke, Sally Green and Prathap Thayan; unfortunately, Paul Garner and Pisake Lumbiganon were unable to join the call) took place on 18 January 2005. The discussions are reflected in this Bulletin. This group will have a teleconference weekly.

Examples of working together

NICS (who provide access to The Cochrane Library in Australia) have been asked to provide CD-ROMs of The Cochrane Library by one of the State government health departments in Australia for medical teams going to Aceh in Indonesia to establish field hospitals. NICS were asked by the clinicians who are going to do this and Wiley have arranged to send the CD-ROMs to NICS.

Paul Chinnock from the Injuries Group is in discussion with members of the working group on umbrella reviews, about summaries for the Injuries Group's series of reviews on blood transfusion and intravenous fluids.

Communication

A basic structure is being prepared for grouping evidence summaries and links to relevant evidence on the special section of www.cochrane.org. When this is in place and some summaries have been added (hopefully, by the end of January) a media release will be issued targeting media in the affected countries. This will be used to draw the attention of people providing health care to the website. Wiley have agreed to help with the distribution of this media release.

Cochrane Colloquium in Melbourne

It has been agreed that time will be made available during the Cochrane Collaboration's AGM at the Colloquium in Melbourne to update people on the situation. This might involve presentations on the overall response, the local situation and the regional situation more widely.

Suggestions of reviews to prioritise

A list of the 141 suggestions received by 19 January 2005 was circulated to the working party on 20 January 2005. A prioritised list will be used to target reviews and evidence summaries.

Preparation of summaries

Staff at the Australasian Cochrane Centre have extracted the relevant data from several reviews that are likely to be high priority. They are in discussion with the Infectious Diseases Group about the next steps in the preparation of the evidence summaries.

Funding

Nick Royle has agreed to convene a small group that will allocate any donations received by The Cochrane Collaboration to help with our response to the aftermath of the tsunami. Jon Deeks (Treasurer of The Cochrane Collaboration) will work with Nick on this.

Contact with other agencies

Through Dan Fox (Cochrane Funders and Users' Forum), we have made contact within David Nabarro's office (coordinating the WHO effort) and information on the prioritised reviews and evidence summaries will be channelled to him.