Italian Cochrane Centre educational and dissemination activities

Background: Since 2004 the Italian Cochrane Centre (ICC) has expanded efforts to disseminate Systematic reviews (SRs) through a series of new educational and editorial activities. Objectives: To describe the educational and dissemination activities performed by the ICC between 2006 and 2007 and to assess the results in terms of social impact. Methods: The ICC translated and published more than 100 abstracts and plain language summaries of SRs for the ‘Partecipasalute’ website, which is dedicated to consumers. We translated and published The Cochrane Library press releases on the Partecipasalute and ICC websites and informed scientific journalists of our initiatives. The ICC organized four 1-day workshops on evidence-based healthcare decision making for physicians. The scope of these workshops is to teach participants how to read and interpret SRs, and to encourage the use of The Cochrane Library. The ICC is responsible for the Italian edition of Clinical Evidence and the national distance-learning program (ECCE). In 2007 we developed a new website using the Archie system devoting more attention to communicating our activities. We now publish a commentary on a Cochrane review in the Cochrane Corner, a dedicated section of the Internal and Emergency Medicine journal, an international peer-reviewed journal. Results: According to the website statistics and survey results, our abstract and plain language summary benefit with Partecipasalute was low. We released three interviews citing the role of The Cochrane Collaboration. Forty-two clinicians participated in our workshops. The satisfaction of participants, evaluated through a survey, was very high. The Clinical Evidence and ECCE projects have been successful both in terms of number of users (reaching over 130,000 doctors and nurses) and maintaining the financial support of the national drug agency. In 2006 the mean number of visits per month of the new ICC website was 2000. So far in 2008, this number has increased by 500 visits per month. Since 2007 a total of ten commentaries were published in the Cochrane Corner. None has been yet cited by other publications. Conclusions: The activities of the ICC gave contrasting results indicating an extremely variable interest towards our activities.