An African proverb says: “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together".
My name is Chiara and last year I started my PhD in Brescia (Italy) on Evidence Based Medicine, dedicating most of my time to Cochrane Rehabilitation. This year I attended for the first time a Global Evidence Summit. There were more than 1.000 people at the event and I felt I was to be part of a great family who shares the passion for evidence. The main message of the Summit was that evidence can save lives, and as the African proverb says, it’s very important to do it together.
I arrived at the Summit not knowing what to expect but with the great desire to get the most from this experience! I had the chance to follow most of the plenary sessions and workshops and what I appreciated the most were the discussions among methodologists, clinicians, teachers, politicians, patients, and students. Everybody had a different perspective!
The Cochrane Strategy to 2020 centres on Knowledge Translation, that is the diffusion of evidence among the different stakeholders, and I can now clearly understand its value. Evidence is useful for all and therefore it should be understandable for all! It is important for me as a PhD student and maybe a future researcher to train critical thinking and understand the importance of evidence.
Soon after coming back from South Africa, I moved to Oxford where I will spend 3 months at Cochrane UK! My objective during the stage in UK is to learn how to disseminate evidence and after my experience at the GES, I’m even more convinced that the sacrifice of being far from my family will be worthwhile: I will work with great dedication for the promotion and dissemination of evidence in the Rehabilitation field.
My “take home message” from the Global Evidence Summit is that evidence can save lives but only if it is available, all over the world, to all people…governments, institutions, associations, researchers, clinicians and patients.
Networking and sharing evidence is a responsibility of everyone!