Towards a framework for evaluating and grading evidence in public health

Abstract

The Project on a Framework for Rating Evidence in Public Health (PRECEPT) is an international collaboration of public health institutes and universities which has been funded by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) since 2012. Main objective is to define a framework for evaluating and grading evidence in the field of public health, with particular focus on infectious disease prevention and control. As part of the peer review process, an international expert meeting was held on 13-1 4 June 2013 in Berlin. Participants were members of the PRECEPT team and selected experts from national public health institutes, World Health Organization (WHO), and academic institutions. The aim of the meeting was to discuss the draft framework and its application to two examples from infectious disease prevention and control. This article introduces the draft PRECEPT framework and reports on the meeting, its structure, most relevant discussions and major conclusions

Predicting late-onset sepsis by routine neonatal screening for colonisation by gram-negative bacteria in neonates at intensive care units: a protocol for a systematic review

“…Following the guidance of the PRECEPT framework,11 25 we will use the QUADAS-2 tool to assess risk of bias in the included individual studies which report measures of prognostic accuracy 22Table 1 shows the main components of the tool.…”

Systematic Reviews for Occupational Safety and Health Questions: Resources for Evidence Synthesis

“…Additional guidance was sought on adaptations of systematic review methodology outside of medicine and health care, especially approaches that did not draw on clinical paradigms and trial methodology. This literature pool encompassed applications of systematic reviews for observational studies and safety research and included a systematic review framework published by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) Office of Health Assessment and Translation (OHAT), the Guide to Community Preventive Services approach to systematic reviews, a guide for environmental health science , and a recently published framework for public health research (Harder et al, 2015).…”

“…The Project on Framework for Rating Evidence in Public Health (PRECEPT) suggests grouping evidence first based on four general domains (disease burden/level of contamination, risk factors, diagnostics, and interventions questions) (Harder et al, 2015). Within domains, systematic guidance specific to the domains or individual study designs will be helpful to guide the synthesis.…”

“…The PRECEPT framework (Harder et al, 2015) suggests upgrading evidence for consistency of findings across settings and study designs for risk factor and intervention studies. Upgrading for consistency of findings differs from downgrading for inconsistency as defined in the standard GRADE approach.…”

“…Van Staa and colleagues (2008) make a strong case that, when evaluating drug-toxicity signals, randomized controlled trials should not be considered the highest research standard. The PRECEPT framework determined that nonrandomized designs that are less prone to bias (such as interrupted time series) should initially be judged as moderate quality rather than low quality, and risk-factor studies (e.g., step-function changes) should initially be rated as high quality (Harder et al, 2015). Systems for prognostic studies may start with longitudinal cohort studies as high quality of evidence (Iorio et al, 2015) or use the phase of investigation (exploratory or confirmatory study) to determine the initial level (Huguet et al, 2013).…”