Challenges and strategies of increasing the production and use of Cochrane reviews: the Argentinean experience

Summary

The Cochrane Collaboration (CC), established in 1993, is an internationally renowned initiative dedicated to improving health care for the world's population. In the late 1990s, the Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre (IbCC) was created to promote the CC in Latin America. Because the production and use of Cochrane reviews were still low in 2002, Argentina implemented specific strategies and a model to expand the IbCC. The objective of this article was to describe strategies to increase the production and use of Cochrane reviews in Argentina. Methods used included surveys delivered to primary health care workers to provide data about their knowledge and use of the CC, and about the production of titles, protocols, and systematic reviews published in the Cochrane Library.

Our survey showed that only 51% of a selected population of primary healthcare workers knew about the CC and only 23% knew about the Argentine Cochrane centre. In the previous year, 60% had never used the CC. To overcome these challenges, we used seven types of complementary strategies: (1) networking, (2) dissemination, (3) training, (4) support to Cochrane members, (5) strategic alliances, (6) research, and (7) fund-raising. An improvement in the production and use of Cochrane reviews was seen in Argentina, and the set of aforementioned strategies could be partly responsible for this increase. Multi-level networking, training and an appropriate centre's mother institution could be the most important interventions. More research is needed to explore this hypothesis. Lessons learned on this first evaluation will help us to continue with the development of the CC in Argentina.