A systematic and living evidence and guideline recommendation map on COVID-19

Under the leadership of the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Infectious Diseases, Research Methods and Recommendations and Cochrane Canada, this project will support Canada's contribution to the global response to the COVID-19 outbreak by bringing together world-class institutions in prioritizing, conducting and mapping synthesized evidence, and in developing clinical, public health and health policy recommendations to research critical questions of global importance for COVID-19. The aims of this project are to provide efficient, easy-to-navigate, adaptable, and freely accessible quality-appraised COVID-19 evidence and recommendations for different stakeholders. For the first aim, we will systematically identify and critically review and map relevant evidence to support researchers and guideline developers in finding the available relevant evidence to their needs, all in one living evidence map. This work is ongoing in collaboration with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. The second aim focuses on immediately and longitudinally collecting all trustworthy COVID-19 recommendations and create a platform that allows decision-makers to 1) easily locate specific recommendations and the information that supports it, 2) contextualize these recommendation through the GRADE approach, supported by capacity-building for contextualization by the central team for various jurisdictions, and 3) provide continuous feedback to support the research optimizing the work on the platform. We are unaware of any other research team developing living recommendations in relation to COVID-19 that can be contextualized and allow a centralized collection and provision of evidence about this contextualization from various jurisdictions worldwide. This work highlights the novelty of the two-way iterative interaction among the map, the team, and stakeholders.