38 participants from 12 countries attended a training school, devoted to the analysis of the quality and bias of human clnical studies.
The school was led by Dr Guy Vergères, Agroscope, Switzelrand. Ms Thomy Tonia (Universsity of Bern, Switzerland), a specialist in the systemtatic reviewing of human clinical studies, was the trainer.
he training school was organized in theoretical parts presented by T. Tonia, group work, and reporting sessions. Guidelines to assess the quality and bias of interventional (Revised tool to assess risk of bias in randomized trials) and observational (Newcastle-Ottawa Scale) studies were used as training material. A common set of three clinical studies (one interventional study, one prospective observational study, one crosssectional study) was used to train the partcipants and discuss their evaluation. The school was successful as it allowed the participants to gain experience in the evaluation of the quality and bias of human studies and to integrate this knowledge into the reviewing of the human studies of their individual WG3 project.