Since its inception in 1993, The Cochrane Collaboration has published 5000 high-quality systematic reviews that allow doctors, health care professionals and health policy-makers to make evidence-based decisions. The collaboration is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a series of videos, available on YouTube, showcasing its historic roots, international processes and worldwide influence.
Just how did a group of 80 like-minded individuals meeting in Oxford in 1993 grow to become an international network of over 28 000 people in 120 countries all with the same mutual goals? The answer is with a great deal of enthusiasm and passion.
Cochrane’s 24-video series tells a variety of stories, each in just a few minutes. Topics range from how contributors to a review are trained and how a review is produced to how doctors in low- and middle-income countries use Cochrane evidence in resource-sparse areas.
Videos on the early years at Cochrane documenting what it was like to be a part of the not-for-profit organization starting up in the early 1990s are of historic interest. At that time, knowledge of systematic reviews was limited to small circles of in-the-know academics.
Now accepted as the highest quality of research evidence, the findings of systematic reviews are used in everyday clinical practice.
“We were blown away with the stories that people wanted to tell,” says Dr. Jeremy Grimshaw, director of Cochrane Canada and part of the committee that decided to produce the video series. “We wanted to find compelling stories to represent a range of individuals, activities, and benefits of the Cochrane Collaboration.”
Filming took place over approximately 12 days. Most of the footage was taken at the Cochrane colloquia in Madrid (2011) and Paris (2012). “In the end, we had recorded 97 interviews totalling almost 34 hours of material,” says Richard Davis, the videographer. “We had to condense them to 24 three-to twelve-minute videos. My biggest challenge was dealing with massive amounts of information.”
About one-third of the videos discuss the history of the collaboration, one-third discuss the work Cochrane does and one-third are interviews with contributors and authors.
Professor Ashraf Nabhan, a contributor to The Cochrane Collaboration since 2006 and coordinator of Egyptian contributors, appears in four videos. “The series lets newcomers and the whole world know about our work,” he said in an email interview.
“It also revealed the magnitude of dedication of some contributors who work efficiently yet in silence. The videos were brilliant in highlighting the profound impact of those unknown contributors,” said Nabhan.
Professor Kay Dickerson, director of the United States Cochrane Center, said in an email interview that she thought the abstract painting in the background of many videos was an “interesting juxtaposition and forces me to think carefully about what is being said and who is saying it.”
The videos, which are being posted bi-monthly throughout 2013, were funded by the collaboration at a cost of approximately Can$72 000.
To view the videos, visit the collaboration’s anniversary website (http://anniversary.cochrane.org/cochrane20-video-series-and-other-multimedia) or its YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/CochraneCollab).