Cochrane Sweden awarded independent centre status

Matteo Bruschettini, director of Cochrane Sweden.

Cochrane Sweden produces accessible health information and reviews for Swedish healthcare professionals and others interested in health. Now the Swedish network has been awarded an independent centre status within the global organisation of Cochrane. "Being an independent centre means that we will be able to offer healthcare professionals even more trainings than before", says Matteo Bruschettini, physician at Skåne University Hospital and director of Cochrane Sweden.

Cochrane is an international network of 37,000 researchers, healthcare professionals and patients in over 130 countries. In Sweden, the network is linked to Lund University and Region Skåne, with its headquarters at Skåne University Hospital in Lund.

Since the start in 2017, Cochrane Sweden has steadily increased the number of registered people with a Swedish Cochrane account - from 397 in the beginning to 2,051 today.

Cochrane Sweden

“Our members help us to create and spread systematic reviews of the best evidence from health research”, says Matteo Bruschettini, director of Cochrane Sweden, physician at Skåne University Hospital and associate professor of paediatrics at Lund University.

With the help of the reviews, which are available in the so-called Cochrane Library, the idea is that for example healthcare professionals get access to the latest knowledge in medical and health research. This will enable them to make the best decisions on, for example, various treatments.
“As an individual employee, it can be difficult to stay up-to-date on all research. What we do is making sure that the reviews are available in a simple language, so that you can quickly get an overview of the research in a particular field.”

The Cochrane Library

Status as an independent centre

A few weeks ago, Cochrane Sweden was awarded the status of a full, independent centre. This means that the Swedish branch has reached the highest level of acknowledgement within the global network.
“It is a recognition of the work we have done so far, and it of course feels very gratifying and inspiring. With the new status comes greater responsibility for us”, Matteo Bruschettini says.

He explains further:
“We have facilitated workshops on evidence-based medicine in several parts of the country for healthcare professionals. Now that we are an independent centre, we will be able to offer even more workshops than we have done before.”

Cochrane Sweden hopes to continue to grow, with the goal of having more healthcare professionals joining the network.

“A future goal is also to start translating the reviews into Swedish in order to make them even more accessible. We do not have the resources for that today, but we hope to have new members join who have the opportunity to take on the task", Matteo Bruschettini says.

Facts:

The international network Cochrane Collaboration was founded in 1993. The Swedish organisation, Cochrane Sweden, started in 2017. The main funders are Skåne University Hospital, Region Skåne and Lund University. Since 2020, Västra Götalandsregionen is supporting as well.
The Cochrane Library is one of the network's main assets. It is a collection of databases for medicine and other healthcare specialties. The core of the library is the collection of Cochrane Systematic Reviews: systematic reviews that summarise and interpret the results obtained through medical research.

The purpose is to make the results of well-conducted and well-controlled studies easily accessible.