CONSORT Group members update the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) statement by collecting relevant literatures to improve the reporting quality of randomised controlled trials. Recently, they have outlined CONSORT-Equity reporting standards, an extension to the CONSORT statement, which had been developed to improve the reporting of intervention effects in randomised trials where health equity is relevant. It will be helpful to improve social health equity or reduce social health inequities. This paper aims to introduce CONSORT-Equity and interprets its usage by a series of randomised trials where health equity is relevant.
The focus of health equity is to enable the public to have fair access to health services and achieve satisfactory health outcomes. With research developments, guideline developers increasingly pay more attention to the fairness in the practice guidelines and have carried out exploration and practice in the relevant guidelines. The GRADE working group has begun to investigate how to use GRADE to assess health equity in practice guidelines since 2014. In 2017, the series of methodological guidelines of health equity in guideline development was officially published. It proposed 5 approaches to evaluate health equity and pointed out current methodological challenges of applying GRADE to assess health equity. This paper aims to introduce the GRADE equity guidelines, so as to provide a reference for Chinese researchers in their practice.
ObjectivesTo systematically review the implementation effects of the full coverage policy for medicines, and to provide evidence for the improvement of National Essential Medicine Policy in China.MethodsWe searched databases including ProQuest, PubMed, CNKI and WanFang Data databases from inception to June 30th 2018 to collect the studies on full coverage policy for medicines. Two reviewers screened literature and extracted related information independently. Then, qualitative analyses were applied to evaluate the impact of the full coverage policy for medicines.ResultsA total of 35 studies on the full coverage policy for medicines were included. Ten studies evaluated the effects of disease control, 12 studies evaluated the impact of the compliance of the patients, 9 studies evaluated the impact on medical expenses and drug costs, 2 studies evaluated the effects of equality, 7 studies evaluated economics, and 11 studies described the improper use and waste of medicines.ConclusionsIn the content of perfecting the selection mechanism and management system, the implementation of the full coverage policy for essential medicines is conducive to promoting equality and accessibility, enhancing drug compliance, improving the diagnosis and treatment of patient diseases ultimately, and making the policy more economical.