"Making Health Care Safer: A Critical Review of Evidence Supporting Strategies to Improve Patient Safety" is the title of the supplement to the March 5th Annals of Internal Medicine. An introduction provides a detailed explanation of this evidence-based assessment of patient safety strategies followed by 10 systematic reviews based on that research. This is valuable information for health care providers. The supplement also is an example of how to set up evidence-based research and what sets a systematic review apart.
What is a systematic review?
A systematic review attempts to collate all empirical evidence that fits pre-specified eligibility criteria in order to answer a specific research question. It uses explicit, systematic methods that are selected with a view to minimizing bias, thus providing more reliable findings from which conclusions can be drawn and decisions made. The key characteristics of a systematic review are:
•a clearly stated set of objectives with pre-defined eligibility criteria for studies;
•an explicit, reproducible methodology;
•a systematic search that attempts to identify all studies that would meet the eligibility criteria;
•an assessment of the validity of the findings of the included studies, for example through the assessment of risk of bias; and
•a systematic presentation, and synthesis, of the characteristics and findings of the included studies.
Many systematic reviews contain meta-analyses. Meta-analysis is the use of statistical methods to summarize the results of independent studies. Meta-analyses can provide more precise estimates of the effects of health care than those derived from the individual studies included within a review. They also facilitate investigations of the consistency of evidence across studies, and the exploration of differences across studies.
(This information comes from Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.1.0 updated March 2011.)
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