Prioritisation of Informed Health Choices (IHC) key concepts to be included in lower secondary school resources: A consensus study.

Background: The Informed Health Choices Key Concepts are principles for thinking critically about healthcare claims and deciding what to do. The Key Concepts provide a framework for designing curricula, learning resources, and evaluation tools.

Objectives: To prioritise which of the 49 Key Concepts to include in resources for lower secondary schools in East Africa.

Quality of information in news media reports about the effects of health interventions: Systematic review and meta-analyses.

Background Many studies have assessed the quality of news reports about the effects of health interventions, but there has been no systematic review of such studies or meta-analysis of their results. We aimed to fill this gap (PROSPERO ID: CRD42018095032). Methods We included studies that used at least one explicit, prespecified and generic criterion to assess the quality of news reports in print, broadcast, or online news media, and specified the sampling frame, and the selection criteria and technique.

The Norwegian public's ability to assess treatment claims: results of a cross-sectional study of critical health literacy.

: Few studies have evaluated the ability of the general public to assess the trustworthiness of claims about the effects of healthcare. For the most part, those studies have used self-reported measures of critical health literacy. : We mailed 4500 invitations to Norwegian adults.

Protocol for assessing stakeholder engagement in the development and evaluation of the Informed Health Choices resources teaching secondary school students to think critically about health claims and choices.

Background: As part of a five year plan (2019-2023), the Informed Health Choices Project, is developing and evaluating resources for helping secondary school students learn to think critically about health claims and choices. We will bring together key stakeholders; such as secondary school teachers and students, our main target for the IHC secondary school resources, school administrators, policy makers, curriculum development specialists and parents, to enable us gain insight about the context.

Objectives: To ensure that stakeholders are effectively and appropriately engaged in the design, evaluation and dissemination of the learning resources.

Development of mass media resources to improve the ability of parents of primary school children in Uganda to assess the trustworthiness of claims about the effects of treatments: a human-centred design approach.

Background: Claims about what we need to do to improve our health are everywhere. Most interventions simply tell people what to do, and do not empower them to critically assess health information. Our objective was to design mass media resources to enable the public to critically appraise the trustworthiness of claims about the benefits and harms of treatments and make informed health choices.

Key Concepts for assessing claims about treatment effects and making well-informed treatment choices.

: The Informed Health Choices (IHC) Key Concepts are standards for judgement, or principles for evaluating the trustworthiness of treatment claims and treatment comparisons (evidence) used to support claims, and for making treatment choices. The list of concepts provides a framework, or starting point, for teachers, journalists and other intermediaries for identifying and developing resources (such as longer explanations, examples, games and interactive applications) to help people to understand and apply the concepts. The first version of the list was published in 2015 and has been updated yearly since then.

Measuring ability to assess claims about treatment effects: the development of the 'Claim Evaluation Tools'.

Objectives: To describe the development of the Claim Evaluation Tools, a set of flexible items to measure people's ability to assess claims about treatment effects.

Setting: Methodologists and members of the community (including children) in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Norway, the UK and Australia.

Participants: In the iterative development of the items, we used purposeful sampling of people with training in research methodology, such as teachers of evidence-based medicine, as well as patients and members of the public from low-income and high-income countries.

Development of a complex intervention to improve health literacy skills.

Background: Providing insight into the developmental processes involved in building interventions is an important way to ensure methodological transparency and inform future research efforts. The objective of this study was to describe the development of a web portal designed to improve health literacy skills among the public.

Methods: The web portal was tailored to address three key barriers to obtaining information, using the conceptual frameworks of shared decision-making and evidence-based practice and based on explicit criteria for selecting the content and form of the intervention.

Assessing equity in clinical practice guidelines.

Recognition of the need for systematically developed clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. CPGs have focused primarily on the effectiveness of interventions, explicitly or implicitly addressing the following question: Will adherence to a recommendation do more good than harm? At times they have also focused on the cost-effectiveness of interventions: Are the net benefits worth the costs? They rarely have focused on equity: Are the recommendations fair? The Knowledge Plus Project of the International Clinical Epidemiology Network attempts to improve the process of CPG development by formulating strategies to consider not just technical issues (effectiveness, and efficiency) but sociopolitical dimensions as well (equity and local appropriateness). This article discusses a proposed lens for users to evaluate how well CPGs address issues of equity.

Systematic review to determine whether participation in a trial influences outcome.

Objective: To systematically compare the outcomes of participants in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) with those in comparable non-participants who received the same or similar treatment.

Data Sources: Bibliographic databases, reference lists from eligible articles, medical journals, and study authors.

Review Methods: RCTs and cohort studies that evaluated the clinical outcomes of participants in RCTs and comparable non-participants who received the same or similar treatment.