Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group
Resource Bank
The Resource Bank is up-to-date for issue 3 2008 of The Cochrane Library.
Introduction
The Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group is part of the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organisation that aims to help people make well-informed decisions about health care by preparing, maintaining and promoting systemtic reviews of the effects of healthcare interventions. These reviews are published quarterly on The Cochrane Library.
About the Resource Bank: Interventions affecting consumer communication and involvement in health care.
The Consumers and Communication Review Group coordinates reviews of interventions which affect people’s interactions with health care. These interventions are diverse and include those to educate, communicate with, inform, support, involve and seek the participation of consumers of health care.
We focus on interventions to communicate with and involve consumers. Other Cochrane Review Groups also deal with these issues, often in relation to a specific disease or condition. This can include, for example, reviews of interventions to educate consumers with a particular disease or condition; to inform them about particular intervention, treatment or screening options; to support them in decision making or the management of ongoing conditions; or to provide them with information relating to a particular medical issue or treatment decision. These reviews therefore overlap with the reviews produced by our Group.
A challenge for anyone making decisions about people’s interactions with health care is to access high-quality systematic reviews evaluating these interventions by systematically locating all of the available systematic reviews.
This Resource Bank aims to improve the accessibility of reviews relevant to communication with and involvement by consumers of health care by providing a complete listing of all relevant reviews published on The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (within The Cochrane Library). This list therefore includes those reviews published by the Consumers and Communication Review Group, as well as relevant reviews published by other Cochrane Review Groups. We include all relevant protocols in the Resource Bank as a measure of research in progress in this field and to identify upcoming Cochrane reviews that will be published on future issues of The Cochrane Library.
To identify relevant reviews and protocols we handsearched The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews for titles and screened the abstracts of those reviews which appeared relevant.
Resource Bank Structure
Reviews in the Resource Bank examine people's interactions with health care in some way - whether through education, information provision, communication with, involvement by, seeking the participation of or supporting consumers. We have classified reviews and protocols into five categories based on the aim of the intervention. These categories are:
- Interventions for the prevention of a disease or problem
- Interventions for the maintenance of health for people with chronic illness
- Interventions related to screening behaviours
- Interventions to prepare for treatment or an episode of care
- Interventions to inform, promote participation or improve the responsiveness of care
Many of these reviews examine complex interventions that may be relevant to more than one category. We have classified reviews and protocols based on the primary aim of the review (as stated in the abstract and/or objectives sections). This classification aims only to help organise the accumulated body of research, and is not intended to be used to unequivocally identify research based on relevance to each of the categories.
How to use the Resource Bank
The Resource Bank includes a complete listing of all reviews and protocols published on the latest issue of the The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews which we judge as being relevant to people’s interactions with health care. We update the Resource Bank is every 3 months.
We list reviews and protocols (reviews under development) alphabetically under the categories above. Each review links directly to the review's plain language summary and abstract, and, for people in countries with free access, through to the full text of reviews on The Cochrane Library.
Send feedback and suggestions by emailing us.
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