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PLENARY SESSIONS

here will be four plenary sessions at the Singapore Colloquium, including the Opening and Closing Sessions. The themes of the plenary sessions have been chosen to reflect some of the major recommendations to emerge from the recently completed Strategic Review of The Cochrane Collaboration. Each session will present some of the key issues around these themes and provide opportunities for discussing how the Collaboration should respond.

Opening Session: Facing the future

Sunday 11 Oct 09, 16:00-17:30h

Guest of Honour
Satkunanantham Kandiah, Director of Medical Services, Ministry of Health, Singapore

Chairs
Edwin Chan, Singapore Branch of the Australasian Cochrane Centre, Singapore
Lorne Becker, Co-Chair, The Cochrane Collaboration

Join us as we celebrate the official opening of the Colloquium in traditional Singaporean style. The opening session features an Asian perspective on the nature of evidence and values, and looks at the health challenges facing a region undergoing rapid demographic and economic change. The Cochrane Collaboration’s own challenges were set out in The Strategic Review and in the second part of the session, Jeremy Grimshaw will guide us through the Review’s main recommendations and the practical steps that the Collaboration is taking to implement them.

Evidence and values: East meets West
Lim Meng Kin, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Priority health challenges: needs and opportunities for South East Asia
Maimunah Hamid, Deputy Director General of Health, Ministry of Health, Malaysia

'The audacity of it': The Strategic Review of The Cochrane Collaboration
Jeremy Grimshaw, Cochrane Collaboration Strategic Review Team

Plenary 1: The Cochrane Collaboration as a virtual college: approaches to capacity development

Monday 12 Oct 09, 09:15-10:45h

Chairs
Paul Garner, Cochrane Infectious Diseases Group, UK
Ova Emilia, Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia

The Strategic Review recognised the tension between the Collaboration’s principle of encouraging wide participation and the preparation of high quality systematic reviews. Capacity development, training and author support are mechanisms for ensuring both quality and diversity of contribution. As an organisation, and through the efforts of many of its entities and members, The Cochrane Collaboration has played a substantial role in capacity development for research synthesis and knowledge translation globally. While rarely captured in our publications and outputs, the formation of a global network that supports, trains and mentors is potentially a contribution that rivals review production and goes beyond the technical support of individuals. This session will explore models of capacity development, highlight some of our efforts in this area and identify areas for further development. 

International approaches to capacity development
Sue Kinn, Department for International Development, UK

South East Asia: SEA-ORCHID Project
Pisake Lumbiganon, Thai Cochrane Network, Thailand

South America: EVIPNet
Tomás Pantoja, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile

Africa: Reviews for Africa Programme
Jimmy Volmink, South African Cochrane Centre, South Africa

Middle East: ViTaMIN Project
Zbys Fedorowicz, Bahrain Cochrane Branch, Bahrain

The Cochrane Collaboration and the World Health Organization
David Tovey, Editor in Chief, The Cochrane Library
Davina Ghersi, Department of Research Policy and Cooperation, WHO

Plenary 2: Complexity in Cochrane reviews: dealing with degrees of difficulty

Tuesday 13 Oct 09, 09:15-10:45h

Chairs
Ken N Kuo, National Health Research Institutes, Taiwan
Rachel Churchill, Cochrane Depression, Anxiety and Neoursis Group, UK

Systematic reviews of healthcare interventions are becoming ever more complex and diverse in both method and scope. The Strategic Review identified the breadth of the Collaboration’s review coverage as one of our unique selling points but as the pressure mounts for Cochrane reviews to address a broader range of questions, new complexities arise. In this plenary session we explore three aspects of complexity - design, intervention and context – and ask how can we ensure that in striving to produce relevant reviews we also keep the review process feasible. This session will use Traditional Chinese Medicine as an example, but reflect more broadly on these important issues.

Systematic reviews in traditional Chinese medicine: an example of complexity of intervention, design and setting
Jin Ling Tang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China              

Design complexity: integrating diverse and complex study designs in systematic reviews
Mark Petticrew, University of London, UK

Exactly what treatment? Review authors’ challenges in going from trials to practice
Paul Glasziou, University of Oxford, UK

Contextual complexity: applying the results of reviews to diverse settings and populations
Russell Gruen, Monash University, Australia

Closing Session: The Cochrane Library - brave new world?

Wednesday 14 Oct 09, 16:00-17:30h

Chairs
Sophie Hill, La Trobe University, Australia
Steve McDonald, Australasian Cochrane Centre, Australia

The Cochrane Collaboration is not unique in facing a considerable challenge to the way it packages and disseminates healthcare information. The proliferation of communication platforms and social networking sites provides opportunities to reach new audiences, but how far can or should the Collaboration go in embracing these new media? In this session we hear from speakers who are at the heart of the discussions about The Cochrane Library’s future direction, including the Library’s Editor in Chief. We finish the session with reflections on the week’s discussions with respect to the Strategic Review and the traditional handover to the organisers of next year’s Colloquium in Keystone, Colorado.

Communicating health information
Norman Swan, journalist and broadcaster, ABC Radio, Australia

Cochrane for the Twitter generation: inserting ourselves into the 'conversation'
Chris Mavergames, Web Operations Manager and Information Architect, The Cochrane Collaboration

Cochrane for the Twitter generation: gr8 or grate?
David Tovey, Editor in Chief, The Cochrane Library

Future perfect? The Strategic Review from here
Jonathan Craig, incoming Co-Chair, The Cochrane Collaboration