Research Agendas for Knowledgeable Patients

Systematic reviews provide a means of drawing together current best evidence for patients to share decisions about their care with their health professionals, confident that the evidence they have is the most rigorous available. When combined with public involvement in guiding research and policy, there is potential for systematic reviews to be seen as the best available evidence in terms of relevance to patients' own concerns, as well as rigour. There is a small and growing pool of research about the methods for, and impact of, involving patients in guiding research. This evidence provides a number of lessons about how such involvement might be developed to increase the relevance and applicability of research, and to ensure that systematic reviews are seen as the most rigorous and most relevant available evidence.