Evidence for Everyday Allied Health

Welcome to our series, Evidence for Everyday Allied Health (#EEAHP)

Short, sharable evidence

Rapid change. Information overload. Not enough time. We're sure you could quickly add more obstacles to keeping up to date with research and ensuring your practice is evidence-based best practice. We recognise this and getting evidence to you, where you want it, in quick, easy and sharable formats are drivers for this new series. We’ve had a great response from nurses and midwives to their ‘Everyday’ series and were encouraged to see AHPs tweeting us to ask for their own. So here it is!

Blogs

We publish a weekly blog on Evidently Cochrane, and this is a good way to bring you new or topical evidence summaries. We love to be able to include a commentary from someone (patient or practitioner) for whom the evidence is relevant, so do get in touch if you would like to write a blog, or contribute to one.

For launch week, we had a great series of guest blogs for and by AHPs, with plenty to interest AHPs across disciplines. You can read about social media for CPD from Naomi McVey and Helen Owen, tweet-leaders with @WeAHPs, and how you can engage with this series and your AHP community online. Chris Morris discussed the challenges, and importance, of ensuring practice is evidence-based. Danny Minkow explored some of the evidence on stroke rehabilitation. Fran Toye took a colourful look at qualitative research and Elaine Miller, who has spoken about physiotherapy at the Edinburgh Fringe, showed that comedy can be a powerful tool for disseminating evidence and changing health behaviours.

Blogshots

In people who have had a stroke, exercises may reduce the rate of falls compared with control interventions (low-certainty evidence) but the effects on the number of people who fall are uncertain (very low-certainty evidence). Non‐invasive brain stimulation may reduce the number of people who fall compared to sham stimulation (low-certainty evidence). The effects of other interventions for preventing falls after stroke are uncertain (very low-certainty evidence). EVIDENCE GAP. Only three of the studies specifically reported on harms. None of these reported serious harms but there is not enough information. Cochrane Review (published October 2019); 14 studies with 1358 people in various settings. The studies investigated various interventions; exercises, non‐invasive brain stimulation, pre-discharge home visits for hospitalised patients and a servo‐assistive rollator and compared these with control interventions. One of the studies also looked at the effects of providing single lens distance vision glasses compared with multifocal glasses.

These images with brief information have proved really popular since we first started making them. Blogshots in this series will be easily identifiable, as they have their own template. We share them on Twitter and we now have a Tumblr for these, where they can be found along with other blogshots, made by us or by colleagues in other parts of Cochrane. We’ll share them with a link to the review, blog or other resource, and with the hashtag #EEAHP.

Take a look at our #EEAHP blogshot collection on Tumblr to download and share freely

Tweetchats

It’s brilliant to have the support of @WeAHPs for this series. If you’re interested in hosting a tweetchat linked to our series, do get in touch.

The Hashtag

#EEAHP

Partners

Oxford Brookes University

#weahp

Links:

Evidently Cochrane blog http://www.evidentlycochrane.net

Cochrane UK website https://uk.cochrane.org and blogshot archive /blogshot-infographic-archive

Twitter www.twitter.com/CochraneUK

Facebook www.facebook.com/CochraneUK

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cochrane_uk/

18 May 2016