EnSygN - Evidence S(heffield)ynthesis group for NIHR : Production of Evidence Syntheses for the Evidence Synthesis Programme

The need for timely, high-quality evidence is recognised by health and social care agencies across the world. Decision-makers, from practice through to policy, face complex decisions about the effectiveness of interventions/programmes, about acceptability to patients and the public, about implementation issues and resource allocation. Evidence synthesis offers an efficient way to provide information to help improve the quality, effectiveness and accessibility of the NHS, social care and public health programmes. However, routes to synthesis production are often protracted: in commissioning syntheses, in assembling teams with sufficient skills and experience and in producing timely outputs to agreed deadlines. Commissioned evidence centres, as currently run by our team for the NIHR HSR&D Programme, the Public Health Research Programme and NICE, offer an efficient way to telescope the synthesis pipeline. The NIHR seeks to extend this successful model and improve its responsiveness in topics of critical importance or where time constraints prohibit formal commissioning. Reviews conducted by Evidence Synthesis Centres address synthesis gaps across the wide span of NIHR activities, prioritised by need, summarising key evidence for busy decision-makers, while evaluating the quality of information and strength of findings. The aim is to produce authoritative single-source documents with simple top-line messages in complex areas. The Sheffield Evidence Synthesis Centre (EnSyGN) will address three existing constraints: Commissioning – a team Director, Methodologist and Project Lead will meet with NIHR staff to understand the evidence need and the current uncertainties that the output is seeking to address. The EnSyGN team will outline a proposed synthesis strategy to address each need together with a suggested timescale, negotiated in each case. Team organisation – EnSyGN will comprise senior reviewers, entry-level reviewers (who will be trained), methodologists and topic experts each working on multiple reviews each year. With multiple staff, each allocated a percentage of time, EnSyGN will be able to assemble a team speedily to work in overlap and parallel as required. Each senior EnSyGN team member has over ten years’ experience of delivering timely syntheses. We will harness efficiencies of project management, methodology and technology to a fully professional operation from commissioning to dissemination. Involvement of key stakeholders (e.g. patients and the public, commissioners, local authorities) will seek to ensure the relevance and appropriateness of each review. From inception each review team will work with other stakeholders, including representatives from the Four Nations, on a targeted dissemination strategy. We will underpin technical excellence of synthesis outputs with our Centre values and functional groups that target Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, Dissemination and Patient/Public Involvement & Engagement. Quality control procedures will operate at a Programme and individual review level. We will manage ethics and governance within the institutional infrastructure. EnSyGN will lead development and application of new, robust “methodology within synthesis” and actively contribute to the other commissioned Centres. The initial years of the Programme will witness a discernible shift in speed of NIHR evidence production, with a shortening of the evidence pipeline, to offer timely and tailored evidence to decision-makers.