An analysis of quality of systematic reviews on pharmacist health interventions

Ref ID 271
First Author A. C. Melchiors
Journal INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLINICAL PHARMACY
Year Of Publishing 2012
URL https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11096-011-9592-0.pdf
Keywords • Pharmacological
• Searching
• Low reporting quality
• Reproducibility
• Risk of bias
• Single reviewer
Problem(s) • Ignores setting or context of included studies which limits review applicability
• No quality assessment undertaken or reported
• Low methodological (AMSTAR) quality
• Individual study characteristics not reported sufficiently
• Single reviewer / lack of double checking
• Insufficient literature searches
• Methods not described to enable replication
• Reasons for excluding potentially eligible studies not provided
Article Type Empirical
Article Subtype Cross-sectional survey/Methodological systematic review
First Author Country Brazil
Checklists • AMSTAR 1
Aim To assess the methodological quality (AMSTAR) of systematic reviews and meta-analysis on pharmacist health interventions published from 1990 to 2009.
Level of Investigation Descriptive
Summary of Findings Fifteen of the 31 included systematic reviews did not report the care setting of interventions of the primary studies, while 6 of the reviews did not define the target population in the methods. For methodological quality, 7 reached a high score (AMSTAR 9–11), 18 had moderate quality (AMSTAR 5–8) and 6 had poor quality (AMSTAR 0–4). It was observed that the high quality articles were published between 2007 and 2009.
Number of systematic reviews included 31
Number of eligible systematic reviews assessed 151
Treatment impacted No
Treatment impacted description
Interpretation impacted Not Applicable
Interpretation impacted description