Evidence Aid special collection for COVID-19

Evidence Aid will help decision makers of all kinds to find, access and understand research evidence relevant to COVID-19 and its consequences. Our short, plain language summaries of relevant systematic reviews and bulletins on the implementation of the evidence will help now and during future pandemics.

Professor Mike Clarke, Research Director and Chair of the Board of Trustees for Evidence Aid

Well-informed decisions are needed to ensure that health and social care is effective and efficient. These decisions require robust and reliable evidence and decision makers need to able to find, access, understand and see the relevance of this evidence to them. However, they are faced with vast amounts of information and struggle with these four steps. This proposal will help tackle this problem, which is much worse in the context of COVID-19. Never before have so many studies been done and articles published on one topic in such a short space of time and no-one can keep up with the literature. This highlights the need for systematic reviews that bring related research together but the number of these has also become overwhelming, with thousands now available for COVID-19. The information they contain needs to be made more accessible to practitioners, policy makers, patients and the public, in multiple languages. This proposal will extend Evidence Aid's efforts to solve this via short, plain-language summaries and bulletins about the evidence and how to implement it. These will be freely available online in at least eight languages and promoted via social media and through an expanded network, including people in lower resource settings.

People and organisations engaged in disaster risk reduction, planning and response wish to make well-informed decisions that will help individuals and communities to recover. This is also true of all those involved in coping with the COVID-19 pandemic, its associated measures and its aftermath. This includes healthcare practitioners, local and national policy makers and the public. They all need timely access to high quality, unbiased information on what works, doesn’t work and is unproven. They are all part of the target audience for Evidence Aid. This need for knowledge is shared by donors engaging in evidence-based philanthropy, and other funders, needing to ensure that their funding is likely to be used in ways that will do more good than harm. These groups are represented on the existing Advisory Group for Evidence Aid which will be extended under this proposal, which would support an expansion of the work of Evidence Aid to meet these information needs in the contexts of the treatment of PASC (or “long COVID”), the impact of treatments for COVID-19 (e.g. rehabilitation following critical care), and changes in health and social care systems that are coping with the impact of the pandemic measures and depleted resources.

This proposal will lead to public good through the provision of a unique collection of summaries of evidence relevant to the treatment of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, or “long COVID”), the impact of treatments for COVID-19 (e.g. rehabilitation following critical care), and the changes that will be needed for health and social care systems coping with the impact of the pandemic measures and depleted resources, including challenges relating to mental health. We will also prepare dedicated bulletins that will help with the implementation of the findings in the underling reviews. This should improve the quality of decision making by a wide range of stakeholders, leading to more informed decisions, improving health and social care and leading to better health and wellbeing.

By providing easy access to the relevant evidence by preparing, publishing and promoting short, targeted summaries, and making this as user friendly and informative as possible, this solution has the potential to impact on large numbers of decisions about health and social care on a delay basis. By improving the ability of decision makers and policy makers are local and national levels to find this evidence, it will help to ensure that existing research is not wasted and that well informed choices can be made about what to recommend and what to use to provide optimal health and social care.

This solution will allow Evidence Aid to move from a largely volunteer driven provision of a relatively small number of summaries, to a substantial upscaling of the number, breadth and usefulness of the summaries and bulletins. This will lead to a much larger impact than was possible with the original collection of summaries by Evidence Aid for disasters and humanitarian emergencies or with our concerted efforts for COVID-19 since March 2020. By providing the funding for a dedicated team of people who will find and summarise the relevant evidence and place it in context, this solution will allow us to provide much more information for many more people caring for many tens millions of individuals. Furthermore by allowing us to adopt more effective means of communicating the information in the summaries and improving their discoverability, we will be able to reach even more people.

Evidence Aid is primarily a digital delivery mechanism. We monitor delivery of outputs (mostly audience digital engagement) via website analytics and social media activity. However, this only gives us ‘breadth’ and does not directly indicate the level of satisfaction or the impact that our work has on people’s lives and livelihoods. In order to gain insight into our deeper impact, we implement qualitative surveys of our users during our project work and we would do this for this solution.

In quantitative terms, measurable outcomes of this project include:

- Number of summaries and bulletins produced and published, and the number of translations into languages other than English.

- Amount of promotion of the summaries and bulletins using social media, including the use of specially prepared posts such as infographics and short videos.

- Amount of engagement with key decision makers and outcomes of this engagement.

- Amount of access to the summaries and bulletins on EvidenceAid.org, and sharing of our social media outputs.

- Uptake of the information provided by Evidence Aid in policy documents and other guidelines.

Our main barriers relate to the funding needed to find and create the summaries and bulletins, improve our knowledge translation activities, and the growth of our partnerships to ensure that the evidence we collate and summarise is brought to the attention of key decision makers. Although we have been able to achieve a vast amount in the past year, this has largely been through the work of unpaid volunteers. This is not sustainable and some tasks, including the optimisation of the website require expertise which is not available in a timely manner pro bono. If we are successful in securing this funding, this would overcome those financial barriers and allow us to recruit a dedicated staff team.

We do not expect any barriers relating to the amount of research evidence available to summaries or our ability to highlight best practice for people wishing to implement new interventions, actions or strategies because of the large amount of COVID-19 related research that has already been generated and which is expected to be generated over the coming years.

Pan American Health Organisation

Queen's University Belfast

Evidence Aid has shown what we are capable in the past year with the production of 500 plain language summaries relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated measures and impacts, based on the findings of 800 systematic reviews. We now wish to grow this activity considerably and to make it more useful and used. To achieve this, we are applying to The Trinity Challenge for the recognition that being a recipient of this prize would bring to the work of Evidence Aid and the value of systematic reviews, for the increased opportunities to develop partnerships with those organisations and influencers who might use the resources we provide and help to ensure that they are used in decision making around the world, and for assistance with the funding needed to put in place the necessary staff team.

We will continue to work with our existing partners and strengthen relationships with others including, for example, through Memorandum of Understanding such as those we currently have with the Pan American Health Organisation and those we are exploring with others, including the Africa Centre for Evidence.

We will also seek to establish partnerships with other organisations involved in the provision of health or social care or policy making, knowledge transfer and the conduct of relevant research. This would include several Trinity Challenge Member organisations, including, but not limited to, Aviva, Bay Area Global Health Alliance, Clinton Health Access Initiative, Google and Facebook, dr.evidence, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tsinghua University, University of Cambridge, National University Singapore and the University of Hong Kong.