How Cochrane reviews can be used in a dissemination project: preliminary findings from the “PartecipaSalute” project in Italy

Background: Raising awareness of The Cochrane Collaboration's products is one of the main missions of Cochrane entities. The Italian Cochrane Centre is a partner of "PartecipaSalute" ( "Participate in Health Care", "PiHC"), a project aimed at fostering partnerships between consumers' associations and the medical community to enhance patients' '70articipation in the research process. PiHC's communication tool is a website - www.partecipasalute.it - and we used it to evaluate the impact of disseminating Cochrane reviews (CRs). Methods: A multidisciplinary committee (researchers, clinicians, patients, consumers and journalists) selected CRs according to these priority criteria: relevance to clinicians and patients, prevalence of the disease and attention by the national media. Abstracts and plain language summaries of four CRs are translated and packaged together with the relevant chapter of Clinical Evidence (CE) (also translated into Italian) into a monthly module called "the Evidence-Based Message of the Month" ("EBMoM"). The website's users are surveyed to see how they preferred EBMoM compared to other ways of disseminating information about healthcare interventions. Results: Starting in February 2006, six new EBMoMs have been released through the website. Users had to fill in a short questionnaire exploring their views of the EBMoMs, how they can be improved and better disseminated. The poster will present the results of the first six months and discuss how to develop the project further. Conclusions: Several projects are being promoted by Cochrane entities to raise awareness of CRs. We choose to combine CRs with other material, including CE, to overcome CRs' too narrow focus and to facilitate the dialogue between doctors (who have free access to CE in Italy) and patients/consumers (to which the PiHC website is targeted). Given the efforts made to make CRs available to the public it may be time to start a Cochrane collaborative project to see which dissemination format works best.