Date: Wednesday, February 21, 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., Eastern (US) Time
This webinar is being produced by the International Association for the Study of Pain’s Methodology, Evidence Synthesis, and Implementation Special Interest Group (MESISIG).
Accurate knowledge of harms resulting from healthcare interventions is critical to safeguard public health. Unfortunately, harm assessment is often inadequate in pain research, likely to underestimate the risk of interventions, and misinform clinical and policy decisions.
This webinar aims to highlight key methodological issues regarding the measurement of harms in randomized trials and systematic reviews, and will provide an overview of optimal methods for harm assessment in pain research. Participants include:
- Christina Abdel Shaheed, PhD, University of Sydney, Australia
Strengthening the reporting of harms in clinical trials - Riaz Qureshi, PhD, MS, University of Colorado, USA
Optimal methods to assess harms in systematic reviews - Georgia Richards, DPhil, Bsc, University of Oxford, UK
Development of the Preventable Deaths Tracker and the power of considering case reports from coroners when understanding harms in healthcare - Michael Ferraro, Bsc, Neuroscience Research Australia (moderator)
- Neil O’Connell, PhD, Brunel University, London, UK (moderator)
About the Presenters
Christina Abdel Shaheed, PhD, is an associate professor and a National Health and Medical Research Council Principal Research Fellow based at the School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Australia. She is interested in research evaluating the quality use of medicines and non-pharmacological interventions across a range of disease conditions including pain, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Her research also advocates for necessary improvements in reporting, both in clinical trials and systematic reviews.
Riaz Qureshi, PhD, MS, is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, USA, in the Departments of Ophthalmology and Epidemiology. He earned his master’s degree in epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and his doctorate in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Maryland, USA. His research interests are primarily in meta-research, both in terms of evidence synthesis and how it can be used to inform guidelines and clinical practice, and studying characteristics of research itself to identify ways to improve how research is conducted. His dissertation focused on methods for assessing and reporting harms in systematic reviews and data visualization approaches for harms collected in clinical trials.
Georgia Richards, DPhil, Bsc, is an Epidemiologist and Health Research Scientist working across academia, publishing, and freelancing in the private sector. Georgia teaches Evidence-Based Medicine in the Medical School at the University of Oxford, UK, and runs the Preventable Deaths Tracker, a vigilance platform that provides the first and only database of coroner reports from inquests in England and Wales.
About the Moderators
Michael Ferraro is a doctoral researcher whose work is centered around the evaluation of treatments for chronic pain. His research interests include clinical trials, evidence synthesis, and methodological work to improve research transparency.
Neil O’Connell, PhD, is a reader at Brunel University, London, UK. He divides his time between research and teaching, and previously worked as a musculoskeletal physiotherapist. Neil is the coordinating editor of Cochrane’s Pain, Palliative, and Supportive Care (PaPaS) group, and was a member of the Guideline Development Group for the UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 2016 guideline for the management of low back pain and sciatica, and contributed to the NICE Quality Standard on that topic.