Eva Madrid participates in WHO meeting
11/10/2024Eva Madrid participates in important World Health Organization meeting
Below is the note published on Cochrane’s official website about the important WHO meeting in which the director of CIESAL participated:
Cochrane helps launch new WHO guidance on best practices for clinical trials
(Cochrane.org / 8 October 2024)
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently launched new guidance on best practices for clinical trials. The document aims to reinforce global standards in the organization, design, conduct, analysis and reporting of clinical trials. It responds to calls in World Health Assembly resolution 75.8, which emphasized the urgent need to enhance both global and national clinical trial ecosystems to generate high-quality evidence on health interventions.
Cochrane’s Editor in Chief, Dr Karla Soares-Weiser, contributed to the technical advisory group established to support the resolution and this guidance.
The WHO guidance offers practical recommendations to assist national health authorities, regulatory authorities, funders and others in facilitating effective clinical trials and research. Key recommendations centre on improving trial design to ensure the relevance of research; an emphasis on scientific and ethical standards; strengthening of capacity and support for sustainable research infrastructure; enhancing clinical trial transparency; and reforms to enable underrepresented groups to participate in clinical trials.
Dr. Eva Madrid, leader of the new Cochrane Evidence Synthesis Unit for Ibero-America.
Eva Madrid, the Lead of Cochrane’s new Iberoamérica Evidence Synthesis Unit, spoke on the panel of the launch event for the new guidance. She highlighted the need for greater engagement between those conducting clinical trials and the evidence synthesis community. Eva stated:
“Disregarding existing evidence leads to redundant findings and fails to prioritize the gaps that we need to fill, missing the opportunity to resolve clinical uncertainties with clinical trials.”
On the right, Dr Jeremy Farrar
In his opening statement, Dr Jeremy Farrar, WHO Chief Scientist, said: “Clinical trials are the bedrock of clinical and public health policymaking and evidence informed policymaking” and urged that they should not only be set up in times of crisis and are used for “answering critically important and clinical and public health questions all of the time.”
Objectives of the new Guidance for Best Practices for Clinical Trials
This document responds to requests by the World Health Assembly to the Director-General in resolution WHA75.8 (2022) on strengthening clinical trials to provide high-quality evidence on health interventions and to improve research quality and coordination to identify and propose best practices and other measures to strengthen the global clinical trial ecosystem and to review existing guidance and develop new guidance as needed on best practices for clinical trials.
This guidance updates and adapts the previous work of the World Health Organization (WHO) on research capacity for the context of well-designed and well-implemented clinical trials as framed in resolution WHA75.8 (2022). It aims to enhance clinical research efficiency, minimize research waste and provide guidance on sustained clinical trials that are always functional and active for endemic conditions and can pivot in time of emergency or pandemics.
This guidance will be distributed to researchers and Ethics Committees around the world through local governments.