A collaboration for the promotion of evidence synthesis: A Canadian-African Partnership

Abstract

In 2018, the Queen’s Collaboration for Health Care Quality: A Joanna Briggs Institute Centre of Excellence (QcHcQ) spearheaded an incentive to increase collaboration and international partnerships. As part of this initiative, six library scientists from the partner institutions of the Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) were invited to Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario to undertake training. The objective was to provide these library scientists with a comprehensive systematic review-training workshop using the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for evidence synthesis. The intense six-day training workshop covered evidence synthesis of quantitative evidence and qualitative evidence as well as multiple methodologies for the synthesis of different levels of evidence. As a continuation of the collaboration a joint systematic review was embarked on titled: The role of library scientists in fostering evidence based health care.

Evidence-based biomedical research in Sub-Saharan Africa: how library and information science professionals contribute to systematic reviews and meta-analyses

“…Hence, there appears to be a need for further research to investigate why LIS professionals in the Sub-Saharan Africa region contribute less to evidence-based biomedical research in their own region. Perhaps there are training gaps for medical and health information professionals in Sub-Saharan Africa as noted in earlier studies [ 17 , 18 ], which could be filled by including evidence-based research courses in the curriculum for information schools in the region.…”