Evidence Based Project

Background
The Evidence-Based (Palliative Care) Project was a Commonwealth funded project charged with capturing Australia’s palliative literature from when the discipline began. The project’s primary goal was to collect Australia’s palliative care literature from 1980, published and unpublished, that was currently unavailable through the common electronic searching mechanisms. The project also undertook to develop a mechanism by which this literature anthology could be made available to the palliative care community.

The process of identifying literature sources, developing schemas to organise the collected data and evaluating the materials collected was undertaken by the National Reference Group. This group comprised clinicians and researchers from around Australia who contributed not only their substantial skills in evidence based practice, palliative care, general clinical care, information systems and research evaluations but also their contacts and networks within the palliative community to ensure the best coverage possible.

Identifying and collecting the data
The initial task was to identify the possible sources of information that could be relevant to the project. Four sources of information were identified:

Abstracts of conference proceedings from conferences held in Australia since 1980 with presentations (including posters) dealing with palliative care.
Reports and other grey literature from state, federal and territory government departments and other national organisations.
Theses and treatises that relate to palliative care completed within an Australian university.
Articles from twelve palliative care journals that are not indexed within the major electronic databases (Medline, Embase, CINAHL and PsycINFO): Palliative Medicine, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management; Progress in Palliative Care; European Journal of Palliative Care; Journal of Palliative Medicine; American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care; Death Studies; Supportive Care in Cancer; Hospice Journal; Psycho-oncology; Journal of Palliative Care; and International Journal of Palliative Nursing. These journals provide the major coverage of the palliative care field.

Making the information available
Access to the literature databases was provided by the development of a website. The primary function of the website was to house the databases created within the Evidence-Based Project and to enable users to search by any word within these databases. The search engine also enabled specific searches by author, specific database (eg, conference abstract) or year.

The National Reference Group and the local CareSearch Project Team took the opportunity to use the website development to offer additional facilities to the palliative care community.

Finding Out More
Tieman JJ, Abernethy AP, Fazekas BS, Currow DC. CareSearch: finding and evaluating Australia's missing palliative care literature. BMC Palliat Care. 2005 Aug 8;4:4.

This page was created in November 2006.