Affiliation:
1. Department of Continuing Education, Centre for Evidence‐Based Medicine University of Oxford Oxford UK
2. Health Economics and Value Unit Children's Cancer Hospital Egypt (CCHE) Cairo Egypt
Abstract
AbstractIntroductionGiven the large numbers of children with cancer in Egypt, the limited resources, and inferior survival outcomes, there is a need to better target resources to improve outcomes efficiently based on evidence. Nevertheless, there is a gap in knowledge about childhood cancer health outcomes and resource use in Egypt. This commentary presents a “context‐specific” conceptual framework of evidence synthesis to improve childhood cancer health outcomes and resource use in a resource‐limited setting in Egypt, using real‐world data and addressing the implementation gaps.MethodsReal‐world data is defined as data relating to health status and/or the delivery of health services routinely collected from various sources outside the contexts of randomized controlled trials that can be used to conduct prospective/retrospective observational research studies.ResultsTo better address this context‐specific clinical problem, the conceptual framework of evidence synthesis proposes to generate three types of evidence using hybrid research methods; (1) Real‐world evidence (obtained from observational studies based on routinely collected data from local context); (2) systematic evidence from the literature (systematic review); and (3) qualitative evidence based on experts' opinions in the local setting (interview study). Generating evidence from the three pillars altogether makes for a stronger approach to better research and tackle the local problem in this specific resource‐limited context, and address the implementation gaps.ConclusionsThis framework serves as a methodological roadmap to generate relevant evidence in similar resource‐limited contexts in low‐ and middle‐income countries, where there is a paucity of published studies in the literature about childhood cancer survival outcomes and resource use.