Gawaine Powell Davies, CGPIS
 Over the past year three groups at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity have been doing systematic reviews as part of the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute (APHCRI) Stream Four funding. Our reviews are on integration and continuity of care, models of chronic disease care and system wide initiatives to improve access to comprehensive primary health care. Nine other groups have also been funded for systematic reviews under this stream. Four weeks from the due date and it is hard to write about anything else.
This has been by turns a surprising, intimidating, frustrating and ultimately rewarding experience.
A newcomer to systematic reviews, I was surprised at the volume of published articles, and then at the much smaller number that ended up being relevant. I was somewhat intimidated at applying appropriate analytic rigour to a complex topic such as integration, and frustrated by the difficulty in finding the nuggets of relevant information. But there was comfort from the colleague who said "it's only a literature review you know" and from Nick Mays who introduced us to the variety of approaches that we could take to our topics. Now, near the end, it is rewarding to see the patterns emerge from the mass of data.
Systematic reviewing is a growth industry (we found 38 systematic reviews relating to integration). It is excellent for getting to know the topic well and is often seen as a way of bringing the results of numerous, sometimes conflicting studies to policy makers - indeed, this is one of the aims of APHCRI Stream Four. But I also wonder: does reducing complex studies to simple summaries filter out important detail and risk reductionism, like evidence based medicine? Will the reviews really address the problems that policy makers face? Will anyone use the results?
All will be revealed in October, when the reports from all twelve systematic reviews will be on the APHCRI web site http://www.anu.edu.au/aphcri
For further information contact:
Centre for General Practice Integration Studies, part of the UNSW Research Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, School of Public Health and Community Medicine University of NSW
E: g.powell-davies@unsw.edu.au
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