Training & consultancy | Cochrane Belgium

1. Courses

Systematic review

Our next course, open to all, will be held on October 9th, 10th and 11th 2024 in Leuven. You can register here.

This course will teach you all about the different steps to take in order to perform a high-quality, methodologically sound and reliable literature overview.

This hands-on course consists of plenary sessions and workshops on:

Writing your review protocol
Searching for studies
Selecting studies and collecting data
Introduction to risk of bias
Analyzing the data and meta-analysis
Interpreting the findings and GRADE

Participants get hands-on experience with all review steps. There is ample time to discuss individual problems of ongoing (Cochrane) review projects with the instructors.

This course is aimed at healthcare professionals, PhD students and researchers who want to conduct a systematic review or evidence synthesis. The course is also relevant for healthcare professionals, guideline developers and policy makers who want to learn more about evidence synthesis and the methodology of a Cochrane review specifically.

You can register here.

We also host SR courses in collaboration with several Belgian universities (UCL, UGent, KU Leuven, UHasselt, VUB & UA) in Spring 2024. Please keep an eye on e-mails and or the website of your doctoral school or medical faculty as registration for these courses is handled by them.

GRADE

Our next course will take place on November 22nd 2024. This will be an online course. You can register here.

GRADE is a method to grade the certainty of evidence in a systematic review and the recommendations in a guideline. The GRADE method is developed by the international GRADE Working Group and is widely used by organizations active in the field of evidence-based medicine.

The target audience of this course is anyone who wants to learn more about the GRADE method or wants to use the GRADE methodology in their systematic review or guideline. Our course focuses on GRADE for intervention studies.

The course is taught in English.

You can register here.

2. Consultancy/private courses

Cochrane Belgium also offers personal guidance to authors of (Cochrane) systematic reviews. We definitely recommend you to follow our course ‘Systematic Review’ first. However, if you cannot participate in any of the future courses, if you have specific questions or if you are looking for support in developing your systematic review, we can still offer help. We charge a small fee to offset our personnel costs, but only after a free exploratory meeting.

We can offer assistance at any step of the review process, including:

selecting the topic and identifying the appropriate Cochrane Review Group;
developing the PICO question and establishing the inclusion and exclusion criteria;
developing the search strategy for different databases;
drafting and filing a Cochrane protocol;
extracting data for the selected studies;
analysing data, including meta-analysis;
assessing risk of bias and GRADE;
reporting.