Membership of the working party

Michelle Tubman (Child Health Field) has joined the working party.

Organisation of the working party

A teleconference of the small group (Mike Clarke, Sally Green, Pisake Lumbiganon and Prathap Thayan; unfortunately Frank Archer and Paul Garner were unable to join the call) took place on 25 January 2005. The discussions are reflected in this Bulletin.

Examples of working together

Colleen Murphy (Global Health Council) has provided details on the evidence summaries prepared by the GHC.

Given the urgent need for treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in tsunami survivors, revision of the Cochrane review: "Pharmacotherapy for PTSD", was identified as a priority by the Cochrane Depression, Anxiety and Neurosis Review Group. A special bursary has been made available from the Health Promotion and Public Health Field to facilitate the updating of the review and, because the authors are based in Cape Town, South Africa, the South African Cochrane Centre funded the attendance of one of them at a week-long Review Workshop there last week and are providing ongoing methodological and technical support.

The Infectious Diseases Group, Vaccines Field and the UK Cochrane Centre are working together to facilitate the fast tracking of the updating of the Cochrane review of typhoid vaccines.

Communication

Gerd Antes and the German Cochrane Centre have agreed to coordinate the publication of summaries via the special section of The Cochrane Collaboration's website. A suggested classification has been prepared for the evidence summaries and links to other sources of relevant evidence. A media release is being prepared for use when summaries are available "live" on the website.

The National Medical Journal of India has expressed an interest in publishing a one page article about the Collaboration's response to the tsunami. Prathap Thayan is working with the journal on this.

Cochrane Colloquium in Melbourne

Details of the special meeting for people from the affected regions and others to discuss the disaster will be circulated soon.

Suggestions of reviews to prioritise

Prathap Thayan, Pisake Lumbiganon and their colleagues have helped to prioritise the list of suggestions of potentially relevant reviews. Sally Green has assessed whether Cochrane reviews relevant to the prioritised topics are suitable for evidence summaries now. Mike Clarke will ask the Collaborative Review Groups (CRGs) whose reviews are not yet ready for information on how much work and resources would be needed to complete or update these reviews.

Preparation of summaries

The Australasian Cochrane Centre, Infectious Diseases Group and the relevant CRGs are working on evidence summaries for suitable Cochrane reviews.

An over-arching summary prepared by the Injuries Group, covering several of their reviews will be used on the special section of the website.

Funding

Discussions are ongoing about obtaining dedicated funding for the Collaboration's response to the tsunami.

Contact with people in the affected region

The message that Jim Neilson and Kathie Clark sent to members of The Cochrane Collaboration in the affected region generated an enquiry from a person in India who wanted to do some epidemiological field work. Liz Waters put him in contact with a medical epidemiologist, currently based in Melbourne, who is also interested in this.

Jim and Kathie's email also led to an email from Arin Basu in India who has started a systematic review of the health consequences of natural disasters. He is working with Mike Clarke on a message for CCInfo about this review, which will invite help with its conduct.

Contact with other agencies

Direct contact has now been established with David Nabarro (who is coordinating the WHO effort) thanks to Dan Fox (Cochrane Funders and Users' Forum) and Tikki Pang (WHO). It is hoped that focal points of contact will be established between The Cochrane Collaboration and WHO, so that information and ideas can be shared.

The South African Cochrane Centre has offered to write to relevant agencies based and/or working in Africa to seek their input to the prioritisation process and to try to establish contacts so that information on the prioritised reviews and evidence summaries can be channelled to them.

Access to Cochrane reviews

"One-click" free access to The Cochrane Library is working well and is being made use of in, at least, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Thailand. The release notes for Issue 1, 2005 of The Cochrane Library (published on 24 January 2005) included information about free access in the affected countries.