Challenges for conducting rapid reviews for health policy and guideline development

Workshop category: 

  • Innovative solutions to challenges of evidence production
Date and Location

Date: 

Sunday 16 September 2018 - 16:00 to 17:30

Location: 

Kilsyth
Contact persons and facilitators

Contact person:

Soumyadeep Bhaumik
Zohra Lassi

Facilitators:

Bhaumik S1, Lassi Z2
1 The George Institute for Global Health, India
2 University of Adelaide, Australia
Target audience

Target audience: 

Those who have been involved (or attempted to) in commissioning, conduct or use of rapid reviews, in any capacity.

Level of difficulty: 

Basic
Type of workshop

Type of workshop : 

Discussion
Abstract

Abstract:

Background:
Rapid reviews are increasingly being used for informing policy, technical documents and guidelines in the public health arena. The World Health Organization released a practical guide for conduct of rapid reviews late last year. Other than this, there is little guidance on rapid reviews and approaches to resolve various challenges during their conduct.

Objectives:
To understand the diversity of challenges encountered while conducting rapid reviews and possible approaches for managing them.

Description:
We will use an open-fishbowl approach for the workshop. The open-fishbowl approach is a participatory approach for conversation in which chairs will be arranged in concentric circles, with an inner circle of 4-55 chairs, to form a fishbowl. Initially the moderators will introduce the topic and discuss challenges they have faced during the conduct of rapid reviews while sitting in the fishbowl. Any workshop participants can occupy empty chairs in the fishbowl and join the discussion. When the fishbowl is full an existing member must voluntarily free a chair. The discussion continues with participants continuously entering and leaving the bowl (with one chair always remaining empty).
We chose the open-fishbowl workshop approach to enable participation of patients and consumers whose opinions are often lost to tokenism in workshops and panel discussions.
The discussion will be free flowing and aim to encompass not only technical issues, but also operational and managerial issues, in the conduct of systematic reviews. We plan to document the results of the fishbowl conversation in the form of a report.

Relevance to patients and consumers: 

Patient and consumer groups are often involved in advocacy for newer interventions/diagnostics or emergency humanitarian crises. Rapid reviews for healthy policy and guideline development is becoming increasingly common for such scenarios. However there are several challenges to conducting rapid reviews and scant guidance on it. We are using an open fishbowl conversation approach for the workshop to enable better participation of consumers and patients in comparison to more traditional approaches.