The following story was received from a student at the University of Nothern British Columbia.

While I was still a Master's student in Community Health, I took on the opportunity to work on a volunteer project with Northern Health. Northern Health was looking for ways to improve practitioner adoption of best practice guidelines in the pursuit of improving evidence-based medicine within the health authority.

I volunteered to conduct a literature review investigating methods of improving accessibility to, awareness of, and adoption of best practice guidelines. After finding a wide array of original research and policy papers, I stumbled across a series of Cochrane Reviews specifically investigating different best practice guideline implementation methods. Many of these reviews provided the exact information I was seeking and presented it in a way that allowed me to quickly find the important details, while still being able to delve into the details of the methodology behind each study included in the reviews.

This was the breakthrough point of my literature review. Using the Cochrane Reviews as a starting point, I used original research and independent reviews to fill in the limited gaps that the Cochrane Reviews did not cover. I was able to write a report for my contact at Northern Health that is being used to direct current and future efforts to improve adoption of best practice guidelines, and I presented my findings at a Canadian Rural Health Research conference. Without those Cochrane Reviews I do not think I would have been able to provide such a detailed report in the time I had available. I am very grateful to have access to The Cochrane Collaboration. It has impacted my education and work in ways no other database or repository has done before.