Evidence Aid Newsletter: 7 February 2023
Welcome to the February 2023 newsletter from Evidence Aid. Please forward it to anyone who might be interested. If they would like to receive our newsletters directly, they should email info@evidenceaid.org.
In this new year, we are spending time considering the future of Evidence Aid – our products, our audience and how we can best reach the people who most need what we do: decision-makers working in the disaster and humanitarian arena. This includes discussions about the next phase in our work on the Resilient Health Systems collection with the Pan American Health Organization, the second phase of which ended in December 2022. We’d welcome information on how you use any of our collections (excerpts from which are given below), which could go into our case studies about the impact of Evidence Aid and, if there are other ways in which we can work with you or you have suggestions for how our work can be improved, we would be pleased to hear from you.
We’ve created two new pages on our website: ‘What people say about us’ and ‘Commissioned projects’. If you would like to provide us with a quote or discuss projects we might do with you, please get in touch. Lastly, to help maintain our work, please consider making a donation to ensure that we can carry our work through 2023: details here.
Excerpts from recent additions to our evidence collections: click the link to get to the full summary
Preventing needle injuries in healthcare workers
Needle injuries expose healthcare workers to infection and various studies have been done to try to reduce these. This Cochrane review found evidence in favour of some of the devices intended to make blood collection and injection safer and that the introduction of legislation on safety‐engineered devices reduced such injuries. It called for more high‐quality studies, especially in countries where both injuries and infections associated with the use of devices for blood collection or injections are common.
(You can find the full summary for this review in our Resilient Health Systems Collection)
Women exposed to domestic and intimate partner violence are at high risk of having physical and emotional health problems and this type of violence increases during and after major emergencies and the associated responses, such as the lockdowns in the COVID-19 pandemic. This Campbell systematic review includes 11 randomised and two quasi-randomized trials. It shows that intensive advocacy interventions may reduce depression and improve quality of life in women who experience intimate partner abuse but that brief advocacy interventions probably do not have an important effect in reducing physical or sexual abuse for these women.
(You can find the full summary for this review in our Resilient Health Systems and Covid-19 Collections.
Frameworks for incident classification in emergency departments
The provision of care in emergency departments is often complex, and an incident classification might facilitate a better understanding of potential issues and improve quality of care, helping to ensure the resilience of health systems. This review, based on searches done in 2016, found that frameworks for incident classification in emergency departments varied widely, with no framework appearing to be better than others. The authors concluded that inconsistencies in the frameworks used, the complex nature of emergency department care and the objectivity of reporting, meant that it would be difficult to develop an ideal classification system.
(You can find the full summary for this review in our Resilient Health Systems Collection)
Ongoing work
- In December 2022, we concluded the second phase of the Resilient Health Systems collection, bringing the total number of summaries of systematic reviews to more than 220, in collaboration with the Pan American Health Organisation.
- We are continuing to work with the World Health Organization on the WHO Knowledge Hub for the WHO Guidance on Research Methods for Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (EDRM). This includes linking with the authors of the Guidance to prepare additional content, including podcasts, slideshows and videos of presentations of these slideshows. We are also starting to share the contents more widely with those who teach on topics relevant to Health EDRM. If you are involved in such teaching, please get in touch with us.
- Our Emeritus Research Director, Mike Clarke, will speak about “The Need for Research-based Evidence to Support Humanitarian Action on Heatwaves” at the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI) online roundtable on “Building Adaptation and Resilience to Heat Waves” on 28 February 2023.
- Our recently submitted abstract to the World Association of Disaster and Emergency Medicine conference, taking place in Kilarney, Ireland in May 2023 has been accepted.
Social media
Four of our volunteers (Leen Khankan, Molly Murton, Carmela Preciado and Emily Meier) promote our summaries and the work of Evidence Aid generally through Twitter (@Evidence Aid), Facebook (Evidence Aid – page and group) and Instagram (evidenceaid). Please follow us and share our content, such as our recent Twitter posts:
If you have suggestions for how we can improve what we do on social media or would like to help us to analyse the impact of the Evidence Aid website and our social media activities, please contact us.
The Evidence Aid team
Information about Evidence Aid staff, interns, advisors and trustees is available here.
Volunteers
Our volunteers are vital to our work. They provide a huge amount of support and contribute to searching, screening, and downloading reviews, preparing, and writing summaries, supporting our website and social media and advising on translations as well as helping out with project management. If you are interested in volunteering with Evidence Aid, please email info@evidenceaid.org.