There has been a rapid expansion in the amount and availability of scientific evidence produced to inform policy and clinical practice. This creates challenges around quality assurance of the evidence generated (as not all evidence syntheses are created equal) and also dissemination of that information. It is accepted that health care decisions should be based on a synthesis of the global body of evidence rather than relying on the convenient selection of one or more discrete studies. Failure to use synthesised evidence in decision-making is known to lead to, at best, waste and, at worst, harm to the public, including increased mortality. Thus, the demand for evidence synthesis skills is gaining momentum and a critical mass of experts in a range of evidence synthesis methodologies is required. Despite the growth in evidence synthesis and the increasing complexity of reviews of evidence, there is an urgent need to improve the capability to do and use evidence syntheses. In addition, the evidence base underpinning many aspects of the evidence synthesis process is weak. This leads to a lack of capacity to conduct reviews, a lack of knowledge and awareness of their benefit to inform health care policy and practice decisions and a lack of clear methodological guidance to inform the choice of evidence synthesis methods. Our proposal for HRB-CBES can improve this capacity significantly. We want to build evidence synthesis knowledge, awareness and capacity among the public, health care institutions and policymakers, clinicians and researchers on the Island of Ireland. Our overall approach to building this capacity within HRB-CBES is to:
Identify existing evidence synthesis skills and where those skills needs to be enhanced, provide training activities such as workshops, webinars and ‘train the trainers’ programs;
Build capacity through evidence synthesis fellowships and studentships;
Advance evidence synthesis methodology through a formal prioritisation process on important, unanswered evidence synthesis methods questions.
At the end of the funding period, there will be greater knowledge, awareness and capacity in evidence synthesis across all stakeholder groups. Our capacity building, and other activities, will help make evidence syntheses more usable in every sense of the word – better designed, conducted and reported, more useable for decision makers and more usable within health care policy and practice decision making. There will be a cohort of highly skilled reviewers with an appreciation and understanding of a variety of evidence synthesis methods to answer different policy and practice questions, as well as a more widespread appreciation for and understanding of the importance of evidence synthesis, from student to later stage career professionals, healthcare workers and the public.
