Duduzile Ndwandwe has published 31 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact factor journals and is the team lead for clinical trial registration and vaccine implementation research projects at Cochrane South Africa, where she shares her vaccinology expertise with colleagues. 

Cochrane is in the final year of its seven-year strategic plan, Strategy to 2020. You can watch the first in a new video series looking back over the last seven years and forward to the challenges and opportunities that remain for Cochrane on the Community website.

Cochrane systematic reviews can help us to make healthcare decisions based on up-to-date research evidence. Each systematic review answers a specific healthcare question by gathering all the relevant studies, assessing the reliability of these studies, then summarising their results to produce a summary of all the available evidence.One type of systematic review is a diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) review.

The authors looked at the effect of community-level interventions to improve access to nutritious food in low- and middle income countries on people, households and communities.

Within three years of obtaining a PhD, Anelisa Jaca, a Postdocoral Research Fellow at Cochrane South Africa, has published 17 peer-reviewed papers, most of them in high impact factor journals. Beyond her passion for medical research, she is interested in making sure that medical research findings reach different communities that need the information, including people who do not understand science.

COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Most people with COVID-19 have a mild to moderate respiratory illness; others experience severe illness, such as COVID-19 pneumonia. Formal diagnosis requires laboratory analysis of nose and throat samples, or imaging tests like CT scans.

Dr Tamara Kredo of Cochrane SA has been acknowledged by the South African Medical Research Council Women in Science campaign as part of Women’s Month. 

Cochrane South Africa is hosting a Protocol Development online course from 24 August - 23 October 2020. The course consists of eight self-directed learning modules of between 45-120 minutes each. Each week participants will cover 1-2 modules at their own pace followed by weekly 1-hour question and answer sessions with facilitators. During the course participants will use the information learned to develop their own protocols, with support from facilitators.

Webinar:  Assessing risk of bias in Diagnostic Test Accuracy reviewsThis webinar is aimed at researchers or health professionals interested in understanding risk of bias assessments in Diagnostic Test Accuracy (DTA) systematic reviews

The 2019 Journal Citation Report (JCR) has been released by Clarivate Analytics, and Cochrane is delighted to announce that the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) Journal Impact Factor is now 7.890, an increase on the 2018 Journal Impact Factor.