Evidence-based Public Health
ESSAY WRITING INSTRUCTIONS
Essay Title:
Cochrane review applicability discussion: Structured applicability of the Cochrane review by Saeterdal and colleagues on 'Interventions aimed at communities to inform and/or educate about early childhood vaccination' to [insert name of the country you have chosen].
INSTRUCTIONS
The perspective you will take as the author of the essay and the country you choose:
Imagine you are working in a health department in a country of your choosing. In your work, you have been asked to consider the applicability of the findings of a Cochrane review for your health system.
The background for this request is that a new policy is being developed to improve vaccination rates and the head of the Vaccination Section needs information about the effectiveness of various interventions in order to decide where investment should happen.
It is not your job to make a recommendation - only to consider the applicability of the interventions to your context, health system and society.
First, select which country you are in. It is sensible to choose a country and health system you know well or where you can get reliable information about vaccination. This can be from grey literature, that is,in government reports or articles which provide data on what is happening in your country.
1. Brief introduction outlining what your essay will be doing
2. A section which outlines the childhood vaccination issues for your country of choice
Please provide a section to set the context for your essay, ie outlines the childhood vaccination issues for the government/people living in your country of choice: rates, coverage, efforts to improve rates so far, etc. The information in this section must be derived from reports or articles that you find yourself, and that refers to data from your country of choice. However, if you have difficulty getting up-to-date data, you could use this World Bank site which has country data for DPT: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.IMM.IDPT.
3. A short summary of the findings of the Cochrane review you have chosen
Provide a short summary of the findings of the Cochrane review.
You may find additional useful information about the interventions in the Characteristics of Included Studies tables.
You do NOT need to go and find other evidence about effectiveness to support your choice of interventions.
4. A structured discussion of the five SUPPORT questions
This is the main part of the essay.
Conduct a structured assessment of the applicability of the Cochrane review, using the five-question SUPPORT check list to guide your structured assessment.
The five questions come from this open access article:
Lavis JN, Oxman AD, Souza NM, Lewin S, Gruen RL, Fretheim A. 2009.
SUPPORT Tools for evidence-informed health policymaking (STP) 9: Assessing the applicability of the findings of a systematic review. Health Research Policy and Systems 7 (Suppl 1): S9,
The five questions are:
1. Were the studies included in the systematic review conducted in the same setting or were the findings consistent across settings or time periods?
2. Are there important differences in on-the-ground realities and constraints that might substantially alter the feasibility and acceptability of an option?
3. Are there important differences in health system arrangements that may mean an option could not work in the same way?
4. Are there important differences in the baseline conditions that might yield different absolute effects even if the relative effectiveness was the same?
5. What insights can be drawn about options, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation?