The working party
The name of the working party is to be changed to the “Evidence Aid working party”.

Kathie Clark has joined the working party. Among other things, she is exploring potential sources of funding, including the possibility of an application to the Gates Foundation.

Several members of the working party met on October 25 2005, during the Cochrane Colloquium in Melbourne. The meeting discussed the working party’s work over the last ten months and issues for the future. In summary:

Evidence Updates
Approximately 2 to 4 Evidence Updates are being prepared per month. Rebecca Ryan (Australasian Cochrane Centre) and Paula Waugh (Infectious Diseases Group) continue to work together on these, along with the relevant Cochrane Review Groups and authors. Paul Garner (Infectious Diseases Group) agreed to investigate adding something to each Evidence Update to encourage people to print and distribute them.

Evidence Aid
It was reported that Evidence Aid had been used by people involved in health care following the Bombay floods, Hurricane Katrina and the October earthquake in Asia. This showed that the relevance of – and need for - Evidence Aid stretched beyond the aftermath of the tsunami. It was agreed to recognise this with an expanded scope. The importance of getting feedback on the quality and use of Evidence Aid was stressed. The possibility of assessing the content and layout of Evidence Updates with, for example, students on courses such as an MSc in Global Health was raised. It was suggested that efforts should be made to increase the number of sites that link to Evidence Aid (e.g. WHO) and to consider whether translations would be beneficial. Deborah Pentesco-Gilbert (Wiley) agreed to consult with others at Wiley about trying to draw more attention to Evidence Aid among journalists writing features articles.

Future
It was agreed that the working party should continue, and that the need for it should be re-assessed in a year’s time with the possibility that it might be disbanded then. It was suggested that stories relating to Evidence Aid should be collected for possible sharing during the next Colloquium in Dublin in October 2006.

Lessons to be learned
Some of the experiences and recommendations to be shared with The Cochrane Collaboration include the need for improved guidance on preparing abstracts for Cochrane reviews and, possibly, validation checks of abstracts in RevMan; the desirability of a function in the new Information Management System (IMS) to create and manage a Topics list that cuts across Cochrane Review Groups and which can be refreshed automatically with information on the status of relevant titles, protocols and reviews; the value of the IMS as a means of sharing documents and, for example, generating and maintaining a list of priorities; the advantages of creating a small group with clear objectives who can work together, get the task done and then disband; and the benefits of maintaining regular communication within such a group.


Cochrane Colloquium in Melbourne
As well as the aforementioned meeting, there was a presentation on The Cochrane Collaboration’s response to the tsunami by Prathap Tharyan, Pisake Lumbiganon and Mike Clarke before the Annual General Meetings of The Cochrane Collaboration and the Collaboration Trading Company on October 23. Evidence Aid was used as an example of how the accessibility of information from Cochrane reviews had been used, in the plenary session earlier that day. Copies of the PowerPoint slide shows are available from Mike Clarke (mclarke@cochrane.co.uk).

Evidence Aid
There are now 23 Evidence Updates for Cochrane reviews available from Evidence Aid, along with two summaries of collections of reviews from the Injuries Group. Several more Evidence Updates are in draft form.

The website is being updated after the publication of Issue 4, 2005 of The Cochrane Library to reflect changes to Cochrane reviews in that issue. For example, among the previously identified priorities for which there was no up-to-date Cochrane review, 11 relevant reviews appeared for the first time or were updated substantively in this recent issue.

The web address www.EvidenceAid.org has been registered, with an automatic redirect to the Evidence Aid pages on www.cochrane.org.

Dissemination and promotion
A recent commentary in the Lancet by Bill Summerskill made favourable comments about the Collaboration’s rapid response to the aftermath of the tsunami through the provision of Evidence Aid (November 19 2005, page 1760).

Discussions are taking place with the co-Chairs of The Cochrane Collaboration Steering Group (Mark Davies and Steff Lewis) and the Chief Executive Officer (Nick Royle) about submitting an abstract on Evidence Aid to the Global Forum for Health Research in Cairo in October-November 2006.


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. It has been updated to reflect activity up to the middle of November 2005. Versions of this list are also available publicly on www.cochrane.org and these are being updated to reflect the new and revised material in Issue 4, 2005 of The Cochrane Library. The working party will prioritise the order in which Cochrane reviews that are ready for summary might be processed for Evidence Updates during December 2005.


Resources for prioritised reviews
As noted above, Kathie Clark is exploring possible funding sources. 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 (mclarke@cochrane.co.uk).


Funding
A few hundred pounds sterling is available from within the donations made 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 (mclarke@cochrane.co.uk).


Contact with other agencies
Preliminary discussions have taken place with the Communicable Diseases Cluster in WHO (specifically, people working on Disease Control in Humanitarian Emergencies) in relation to the guidance in the WHO Technical Note (”South Asia, earthquake-affected areas, 2005”), which was prepared following the October earthquake.