Centre for Evidence Synthesis and GRADE
Why GRADE?
GRADE is short for “Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation”. Decisions about evidence and recommendations in healthcare are complex. In making a recommendation to use a particular treatment, there are many trade-offs around the effectiveness of the treatment, the quality of patient outcomes, the cost of delivery and so on.
Systematic reviews of the effects of healthcare provide an essential input to making informed decisions. Similarly, practice guidelines help users to evaluate recommendations. Overall, these evidence-based approaches to healthcare seek to prevent errors in health delivery, better outcomes for patients, and better use of resources.
Nottingham Ningbo GRADE Centre
Nottingham is a world leader in the use of routinely collected clinical data to distil the best available clinical evidence into practical and usable clinical guidelines. Building on that research excellence, in early 2018, the Ningbo GRADE Centre was established to develop clinical guidelines for China. There are 10 GRADE centres globally and two in China.
Our goal is to become China’s leading centre for evidence-based healthcare, utilising evidence synthesis methods and GRADE evidence to decision (EtD) framework to accelerate and advance the development of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines in China.
External Partners
GRADE is an international working group that began in 2000 as an informal collaboration to address the shortcomings of grading systems in healthcare, especially around the quality (or certainty) of evidence and the strength of recommendations.
Cochrane, a global non-profit organization with contributors for more than 130 countries, was established to promote evidence-based health decision-making by producing credible and accessible health information in 1993.