The Cochrane Collaboration encourages the involvement of healthcare consumers, either as part of the review team or in the editorial process. Consumer involvement helps ensure that reviews:
address questions that are important to people;
take account of outcomes that are important to those affected;
are accessible to people making decisions; and
adequately reflect variability in the values and conditions of people, and the circumstances of health care in different countries.
Relatively little is known about the effectiveness of various means of involving consumers in the review process or, more generally, in healthcare research (Nilsen 2006). However, the Collaboration supports consumer involvement in principle. This is based on our principles, good logic, and evidence that the views and perspectives of consumers often differ greatly from those of healthcare providers and researchers (Bastian 1998).
Consumers are participating in the development of protocols and reviews in the following ways:
supporting CRGs to establish priority lists for reviews;
co-authoring reviews;
contributing to a consumer consultation during protocol and review development; and
peer reviewing protocols and reviews.
Whenever consumers (or others) are consulted during the development of a protocol or review, their contribution should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section of the protocol or review. Where input to the review is more substantive formal inclusion in the list of review authors for citation may also be appropriate, as it is for other contributors (see Chapter 4, Section 4.2.2).