the importance of prospero to the national institute for health research

COMMENTARY Open Access

The importance of PROSPERO to the NationalInstitute for Health ResearchSally Davies

Abstract

An important activity of the National Institute for Health Research is to commission and support the preparation ofsystematic reviews. For research commissioners, the international prospective register for systematic reviews knownas PROSPERO provides an important further step in ensuring the quality and integrity of research evidence and willhelp avoid unplanned research duplication.

BackgroundA key role of the National Institute for Health Research(NIHR) is to develop the research evidence to supportdecision-making by professionals, policy-makers andpatients, to make this evidence available, and to encou-rage its uptake and use.Decision-makers in health care, both clinicians (mak-

ing decisions directly with their patients) and policy-makers, rely particularly on systematic reviews. Theserepresent the highest level in a hierarchy of research evi-dence, especially when they combine the findings frommultiple randomized controlled trials using meta-analy-sis. At a time when the amount of new publishedresearch evidence is increasing so rapidly, systematicreviews also provide an important practical way for pro-fessionals to remain up to date with developments inevidence in their fields.

DiscussionThe NIHR is making sure that the UK health service hasaccess to the best possible evidence to inform decisionsand choices by commissioning systematic reviews, bybuilding capacity for their conduct and supporting thedevelopment of methods. Over the last 5 years, theNIHR has invested over £35 million in the infrastructureand related programs that are required within the UK tosupport the production of high-quality systematicreviews, and it will continue to invest in this key area.However, resources are finite and, in the same way

that health services must continually strive for

effectiveness and efficiency in the treatments and ser-vices they provide, so research commissioners mustensure that waste is avoided in the development ofresearch evidence. Investment in new research studiescan only be justified when the questions they areaddressing cannot be answered by existing evidence [1].Systematic reviews provide an important way of definingunanswered questions in health and social care, andresearch commissioners are increasingly expecting appli-cations for research funds to be supported by the find-ings of systematic reviews.The NIHR has supported the development of Interna-

tional Register for Health Research, PROSPERO, by theNIHR’s Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at theUniversity of York. PROSPERO provides the first globalonline facility to register systematic reviews for researchinto health and social care, designed through widespreadconsultation, to be used internationally to promote bestpractice around the world.For the National Health Service and the NIHR, the

development of PROSPERO represents an importantfurther step in ensuring the quality and integrity ofresearch evidence. The transparency achieved throughprospective registration of systematic reviews shouldpromote high methodological standards and may helpreduce selective reporting of research.The register will also be an important tool for

researchers and research commissioners who need toavoid unplanned and potentially wasteful duplication ofsystematic reviews. For those relying on systematicreviews to develop national guidance, such as theNational Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence theregister will provide important indications of what

Correspondence: enquiries@nihr.ac.ukChief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser, Department of Health,London, SW1A 2NS, UK

Davies Systematic Reviews 2012, 1:5http://www.systematicreviewsjournal.com/content/1/1/5

© 2012 Davies; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative CommonsAttribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction inany medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

reviews are being carried out and when the findings arelikely to become available.

ConclusionThe NIHR encourages all those undertaking systematicreviews to register them prospectively with PROSPERO,and recommends the register to decision-makers andresearch commissioners as an invaluable source of infor-mation about what is happening in this key area ofresearch endeavor.

AcknowledgementsThe author thanks the NIHR Evaluation, Trials and Studies CoordinatingCentre for help in preparing the article for publication

Competing interestsThe author is the lead for Research & Development at the Department ofHealth, England and for the NIHR.

Received: 3 November 2011 Accepted: 9 February 2012Published: 9 February 2012

Reference1. Chalmers I, Glasziou P: Avoidable waste in the production and reporting

of research evidence. Lancet 2009, 374:86-89.

doi:10.1186/2046-4053-1-5Cite this article as: Davies: The importance of PROSPERO to theNational Institute for Health Research. Systematic Reviews 2012 1:5.

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