Source | Study Design | Participants and setting | Response rate | Content area of systematic reviews | Intervention | Study outcomes | Quality assessment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ciliska 1999 | Cross-sectional survey | Public health policymakers and managers | Initial survey: 87% | 1. Home visiting as a public health intervention | Five systematic reviews disseminated to public health decision makers in 1996 | 91% requesting systematic review in first survey remembered receiving the information | Inadequate reporting of frequency data |
 |  | N = 225 | Three-month follow up: 93% | 2. Community-based heart health promotion |  | Of those who remembered, 23% stated it played a part in program planning or decision-making | Discrepancy in number of eligible participants |
 |  | Canada |  | 3. Adolescent suicide prevention |  | 57% (of the 23%) reported it influenced actual recommendations made to others - 64% of those recommendations were accepted | Conclusions incongruent with data presented |
 |  |  |  | 4. Community development |  | Implementation of policies is implied. No specific examples are given | Generalizable only to public health professionals making decisions in Ontario, Canada |
 |  |  |  | 5. Parent-child health |  |  | No control group |
 |  |  |  |  |  | Information is self reported | Clustering effect |
Dobbins 2001a | Cross-sectional survey | Public health policymakers and managers | Two year follow up: 95.9% | 1. Home visiting as a public health intervention | Follow-up to Ciliska 1999 two years later | 63% of respondents reported they had used at least one of the systematic reviews in the past 2 years to make a decision | Large number of independent variables with small sample makes interpretation of statistical analysis uncertain |
Dobbins 2001b | Â | N = 141 | Â | 2. Community-based heart health promotion | Â | Implementation of policies is implied. No specific examples are given | Generalizable only to public health professionals making decisions in Ontario, Canada |
 |  | Canada |  | 3. Adolescent suicide prevention |  |  | No control group |
 |  |  |  | 4. Community development |  | Information is self reported | Clustering effect |
 |  |  |  | 5. Parent-child health |  |  |  |
Dobbins 2009 | Randomised controlled trial | Public health policymakers and managers | 108 out of 141 health departments participated in study | Healthy body weight promotion in children | Health department randomised to receive one of three interventions over a period of one year: | No significant effect on global evidence-informed decision-making | The rate of successful intervention may have differed across the three intervention groups due to discrepancies in the ability of interventions to be implemented |
 |  | N = 108 | Follow up data collected from 88 of 108 health departments |  | 1. access to an online registry of systematic reviews | Significant effect observed for tailored messages plus access to online registry of systematic reviews (p < 0.01) in health policies and programs | Investigators were limited by participants' ability to self report |
 |  | Canada |  |  | 2. tailored messages plus access to the online registry of systematic reviews |  | One representative individual for each organization used to provide data |
 |  |  |  |  | 3. tailored messages plus access to the registry along with a knowledge broker who worked one-on-one with decision makers |  | 30% of participants had limited engagement with knowledge brokers, thus caution recommended with generalizability. |