Abstract

The Cochrane Library is a regularly-updated source of evidence-based reviews to guide clinical care practices. Over the past 15 years, clinicians and consumers have collaborated to generate several hundred Cochrane reviews of a range of therapies relevant to pregnancy and perinatal health. By meta-analysing data from several trials, Cochrane reviews generate more precise estimates of the benefit of important interventions. This technique has also proved useful for defining the harmful effect of interventions which individual trials were not powered to detect. Cochrane reviews have also been used to inform future research strategies- several recent large trials have been developed because a Cochrane review had highlighted the paucity of available evidence to guide practice. Over the next decade, on-going challenges for the Cochrane Collaboration include the need to develop more user-friendly interfaces and to extend the relevance of reviews to perinatal care practices in low-income settings.