Evidence based research for coping in emergencies goes online
http://www.100md.com
《英国医生杂志》
People called in to help in health emergencies, such as the recent tsunami in Asia, will be able to get comprehensive up to date evidence based information, from a single source, on best treatments and approaches to handle such a crisis, thanks to the latest measures by the Cochrane Collaboration.
The collaboration has pooled together a database summarising the effectiveness of various interventions in crisis situations, from cholera vaccination to effective interventions for post-traumatic stress, available free on its website, www.cochrane.org.
"This will provide a unique resource for people making policy decisions about the types of health care to provide, as well as people who are planning, providing, and receiving health care in circumstances such as those caused by the tsunami," said Mike Clarke, professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Oxford and convenor of the working group which has set up the initiative.
"We hope Evidence Aid will make it easier to treat people and save lives," he added. "It will be a terrible waste if people cannot access evidence about which interventions work, which don抰, and which might even be harmful."
Although the idea emerged after the tsunami, he said they hoped that it would develop into a site that would be useful to anyone dealing with an emergency, whether it be natural; caused by terrorist action, as on 11 September 2001; or the result of mass migration or starvation caused by conflict.
Concise summaries of Evidence Aid are available free of charge on the website. They link to the full evidence, which is already available on the Cochrane Library or, if not, to the original evidence published elsewhere. Many of the links on the site take the reader to articles in the BMJ Publishing Group抯 Clinical Evidence. Although many of the summaries were already available on the Cochrane site, this is the first time that all those summaries that are potentially relevant to disasters have been made easily available through one part of the site, without needing to search on every possible topic area individually.
Jim Neilson, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Liverpool University and co-chairman of the group working on the project, said that the collaboration felt that it had a moral duty to do what it could to help.
The move was welcomed by people working in the region affected by the tsunami. Pisake Lumbiganon, director of the clinical epidemiology unit at Khon Kaen University, Thailand, and convenor of the Thai Cochrane Network, said that he was grateful for the initiative. "We hope that people in the field can give us feedback and suggestions to make the summaries even more useful," he said.
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international not for profit organisation that aims to make up to date evidence based information about health care available worldwide. It publishes systematic reviews of healthcare research quarterly in its online library. The information on which these are based is drawn together collaboratively by more than 11 000 people working in some 90 countries.
Shortly after the tsunami disaster, the collaboration, and its publishers, Wiley, agreed to make the full Cochrane Library available free of charge to people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Somalia, Kenya, and the Seychelles until July 2005(Lynn Eaton)
The collaboration has pooled together a database summarising the effectiveness of various interventions in crisis situations, from cholera vaccination to effective interventions for post-traumatic stress, available free on its website, www.cochrane.org.
"This will provide a unique resource for people making policy decisions about the types of health care to provide, as well as people who are planning, providing, and receiving health care in circumstances such as those caused by the tsunami," said Mike Clarke, professor of clinical epidemiology at the University of Oxford and convenor of the working group which has set up the initiative.
"We hope Evidence Aid will make it easier to treat people and save lives," he added. "It will be a terrible waste if people cannot access evidence about which interventions work, which don抰, and which might even be harmful."
Although the idea emerged after the tsunami, he said they hoped that it would develop into a site that would be useful to anyone dealing with an emergency, whether it be natural; caused by terrorist action, as on 11 September 2001; or the result of mass migration or starvation caused by conflict.
Concise summaries of Evidence Aid are available free of charge on the website. They link to the full evidence, which is already available on the Cochrane Library or, if not, to the original evidence published elsewhere. Many of the links on the site take the reader to articles in the BMJ Publishing Group抯 Clinical Evidence. Although many of the summaries were already available on the Cochrane site, this is the first time that all those summaries that are potentially relevant to disasters have been made easily available through one part of the site, without needing to search on every possible topic area individually.
Jim Neilson, professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Liverpool University and co-chairman of the group working on the project, said that the collaboration felt that it had a moral duty to do what it could to help.
The move was welcomed by people working in the region affected by the tsunami. Pisake Lumbiganon, director of the clinical epidemiology unit at Khon Kaen University, Thailand, and convenor of the Thai Cochrane Network, said that he was grateful for the initiative. "We hope that people in the field can give us feedback and suggestions to make the summaries even more useful," he said.
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international not for profit organisation that aims to make up to date evidence based information about health care available worldwide. It publishes systematic reviews of healthcare research quarterly in its online library. The information on which these are based is drawn together collaboratively by more than 11 000 people working in some 90 countries.
Shortly after the tsunami disaster, the collaboration, and its publishers, Wiley, agreed to make the full Cochrane Library available free of charge to people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Somalia, Kenya, and the Seychelles until July 2005(Lynn Eaton)