El Dr. Agustín Ciapponi, general director of Cochrane Argentina and the Cochrane IECS center, He inaugurated a diploma in systematic reviews and meta-analysis at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Concepción (UdeC) in Chile. This initiative is part of a cooperation agreement recently signed between the IECS and the UdeC.
Ciapponi gave an inaugural conference for the entire academic community and began the course. “There is always a need for relevant clinical information; but there is also an overabundance of information” and for this it is necessary to analyze it critically, said Ciapponi.
In this conference, he pointed out that for a doctor to be properly updated, in a very limited area, he would need to read 17 original articles a day. In “this mountain of information,” systematic reviews become relevant, “a research design that allows searching for everything that is published and unpublished on a topic to answer a specific health question.”
Ciapponi pointed out that this methodology is used in different areas, such as social sciences, psychology and more recently in the field of health, where it has gained some popularity, because it facilitates, for example, the preparation of clinical practice guides.
The diploma is semi-face-to-face and is aimed at professionals who work in one of the five careers taught by the UdeC Faculty of Medicine: Kinesiology, speech therapy, medicine, obstetrics and medical technology.
According to the vice dean of the UdeC, Jorge Gajardo, the brand new diploma seeks to provide academics with tools to continue improving publication rates.