New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

As you probably already know, the Cochrane Collaboration is an international not-for-profit organisation that aims to produce and disseminate up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare.  Faced with approximately half a million new health research articles being published each year, it is a tall order for the average clinician to stay abreast of the literature – even within their own area of speciality.  What the Cochrane Collaboration offers is highly rigorous systematic reviews of the literature on topics to do with the effectiveness of various health care interventions.  Previously the Cochrane Collaboration libraries have been available through medical schools, hospitals and the like – but public access in New Zealand has been somewhat limited.

Recently, I discovered that free and public access to the Cochrane Library has been made available (i.e. funded) through the Ministry of Health (MoH) website.  Apparently, this has been on offer for the better part of a year, but to access this service one needed to know where to look and what to look for.  So – here is a beginner’s guide to accessing all of the Cochrane Collaboration databases for free from anywhere in New Zealand:

Step 1: Visit the (MoH) website – www.moh.govt.nz

Step 2: Look down the left hand menu (entitled ‘Health Topics A-Z’) on the MoH homepage.  Near the bottom there is link entitled ‘Free online health information’.  Click on this.

Step 3:  There is an interesting link here to the British Medical Journal’s ‘Best Treatment’s website’ that you might want to look at later, but for now scroll down to click on the subheading ‘Cochrane Collaboration’… and on the new webpage that opens up, click again on the words ‘The Cochrane Library’ in the first line of the second paragraph.  This opens a new window in your browser: the Cochrane Library’s homepage.

Searching for Systematic Reviews in the Cochrane Library Database:

• In the Cochrane Library website, look for the right-hand menu.  There are five entry points: for "New Users", for "Clinicians", for "Researchers", for "Patients", and for "Policy Makers".  Click on any of these will take you to a page with information for that specific group of people.
• You can do a simple search for a Cochrane Systematic review on any topic by entering that topic in the search menu at the top right of any entry page.  (There is also a link here to an ‘Advance Search’ engine and other options for more sophisticated search strategies.) 
• As an example write ‘Occupational Therapy Rheumatoid Arthritis’ in the search field and click ‘Go’.  This brings up a new page with two options (at least this was the case as of 19 July 2007).  For interest sake, click on the word ‘Record’ under the heading ‘Occupational therapy for rheumatoid arthritis.’  (For a brief review of this particular systematic review, click here.)
• The new window that opens contains the review.  Look at the top of any Cochrane review and you may see either the word ‘Review’ or ‘Protocol’ in square brackets at the top.  If it says ‘Review’ here, you are looking at a completed review.  If is says ‘Protocol’, you have instead just a description of the method for a review that is yet to be completed (i.e. the authors’ intention to do a review and how, but no results).
• Other useful information at the top of the review here are: the date the review was first published, the date of the most recent substantive amendment and the correct method for citation of the systematic review.
• Many of these reviews are extraordinarily comprehensive – meaning that printing them out in full may required a hundred or more pages of printing!  However, the Cochrane Collaboration has fairly recently introduced summary PDF files of these reviews.  If you look at the left-hand menu you will see an option to click on a PDF file for the systematic review – although even these can be dozens of pages long.
• If you are interested in a very brief overview the subject – read just the ‘Abstract’, including ‘Author’s conclusions’.  Of interest, there is also a ‘Plan Language Summary’ for every review.  This is basically an overview of the review in lay language.

Happy Hunting!