Successful scientific tour of medical students supported by CIESAL researchers comes to a close
30/09/2023
From left to right, front row: Benjamín Cruzat, Diego Grandi, Fernando Briceño, Nicolás Flores. From left to right, back row: Nicolás Meza, Roberto Garnham, Eva Madrid, Javier Bracchiglione.
Fernando Briceño, Benjamín Cruzat, Nicolás Flores and Diego Grandi, all students and assistants at the School of Medicine’s Clinical Research Incubator, took part in the 28th Colloquium of the Cochrane Collaboration – which took place in London between 4 and 6 September – where they presented four papers based on a general analysis of all articles published in the Revista Médica de Chile between 2017 and 2021, as a five-year overview of Chile’s national biomedical literature.
To carry out this project, the students spent the summer of 2023 researching and analysing the full texts of all of the published articles in order to extract data for their respective papers.
Benjamín Cruzat during the presentation of results at the seminar held at the Teaching Centre of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Fernando Briceño evaluated the lead authorship of these articles in terms of their gender balance, regional distribution, and professional field, and carried out an analysis of the most frequent methodological designs in each category, as well as analysing the quality of reporting according to the guidelines used around the world. Benjamín Cruzat analysed the funding received for each study and how this was related to the authors’ declaration of conflicts of interest. Nicolás Flores analysed the presence of certain methodological biases, and Diego Grandi reviewed aspects of equity, diversity and inclusion over the same period.
Nicolás Flores and Fernando Briceño at the Cochrane Colloquium poster presentation in London.
It should be noted that other undergraduate researchers from the School of Medicine were also involved in this project: Natalia Riva, Sebastián Villagrán, Carlos Cabrera, Daniela Morales, Germán Loyola, Francisca Bernal, Felipe Álvarez, Santiago Weinborn, Marcelo Quezada and Benjamín Carrasco, all assistants at the research incubator.
During their stay in London the students actively participated in advanced workshops on various aspects of Evidence Based Medicine.
From left to right: Nicolás Meza, Eva Madrid, Sir Iain Chalmers (founder of the Cochrane Collaboration), Roberto Garnham.
During the second part of the tour, the students visited the Teaching Centre of the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, part of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where they discussed the findings of the research presented in the United Kingdom, as well as its relevance for the Iberoamerican region, and strategic projections within the framework of the Iberoamerican Cochrane Network. Researchers from Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Spain, Peru and Colombia took part in the event, in addition to researchers from the Catalan centre.
The students were supervised during the development stage of the research project by CIESAL researchers Javier Bracchiglione, Eva Madrid, Nicolás Meza and Roberto Garnham, who were also present at the aforementioned events.
Support for young researchers in the early stages of their training has been a fundamental pillar of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Health Studies (CIESAL) throughout the six years of its existence.