Making the Health Care System Work for Consumers

The ALOIS Community Project for the Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group created this e-learning course for caregivers of people with dementia to learn how to become involved with and understand research and evidence in dementia.

Cochrane Training explores evidence-based healthcare and systematic reviews and offers consumer training on using evidence.

Consumer Involvement in Guideline Development: Why and How to Participate is a video that explains the process of developing clinical practice guidelines and the need for educated consumers to serve on clinical practice guideline panels. In March 2011, the Institute of Medicine released its report, "Clinical Practice Guidelines We Can Trust." Standard 3 of this report outlines the expectations for consumer involvement. (March 2011)

Understanding Evidence-Based Healthcare is a web course that has been created by the United States Cochrane Center as part of a project undertaken by Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare (CUE). It is designed to help consumer advocates understand the fundamentals of evidence-based healthcare concepts and skills. Registration is open and free of charge.

YourHealthNet Consumer Health Research Website People want to be engaged in decision making about health care for themselves and their families. But to make informed decisions, consumers need to have access to high-quality research from independent sources. The Centre for Health Communication and Participation's website explains evidence-based health research and systematic reviews in a visually appealing and user-friendly way, and it explains how patients can use this information to help make health care decisions. The site also provides recordings of real consumer stories where people describe how they used the reviews to inform their health decision making. Useful links to other consumer-oriented health research websites are included on the Resources page.