Welcome to the CEPHI Project!

Intro

This research project is being led by the EPPI-Centre at University College London with Co-production Collective. It aims to understand how we can make research evidence more useful for local decision-making.

We will be focusing specifically on evidence related to childhood obesity because this impacts negatively on the health of large numbers of children and young people. Despite substantial investments in weight management and obesity prevention interventions, levels have remained broadly similar over recent years.

One reason for this could be that interventions from one local area are being implemented in other areas where they’re not suitable. At the moment, there are few strategies for checking whether an intervention that worked somewhere else will work in a new place.

The proposed research will explore how systematic reviews and meta-analyses can be made more useful by understanding whether their findings are generalisable to different local contexts.

• Systematic reviews bring together the findings of multiple research studies using systematic and transparent methods.

• Meta-analysis is a method often used in systematic reviews to summarise the results from different studies.

Because reviews and meta-analyses bring together multiple studies, often from different contexts or even different countries, we need to find ways of understanding whether their overall findings are relevant and useful for informing decisions in a local area or a specific country.