Guide to community preventive services data abstraction method

Description

“Developing an Evidence-Based Guide to Community Preventive Services—Methods” is a process for ‘doing’ knowledge synthesis. This method is defined as part of the creation of the Guide to Community Preventive Services: Systematic Reviews and Evidence-Based Recommendations. This method adds to a developing body of literature on conducting syntheses, specifically for clinical preventive services and medical care. While empirical evidence is only one element in decision-making, decisions about the appropriate responses to public health problems have been made with incomplete empirical evidence.

This evidence-based approach to synthesis is intended to reduce errors in information collection and interpretation, and to enhance the strength of recommendations arising from public health literature. There are eight steps involved in retrieving, evaluating and synthesizing evidence into recommendations. This document provides details on each step of the process. For more information on the tool used for assessing and summarizing the interventions, please see the “Guide to Community Preventive Services Data Abstraction Form”.

Steps for Using Method/Tool

There are eight steps involved in Guide to Preventive Services systematic review:

1. Forming multidisciplinary chapter development teams of 4-10 individuals;
2. Developing a conceptual approach to organizing, grouping, selecting and evaluating the interventions in each chapter;
3. Defining key areas on which to focus, and select or develop a logic framework;
4. Selecting interventions to be evaluated;
5. Searching for and retrieving evidence;
6. Assessing the quality and summarizing the body of evidence of effectiveness;
7. Translating the body of evidence of effectiveness into recommendations; and
8. Identifying and summarizing research gaps